How Task Tracking Software Makes Management Easier

Are you feeling overwhelmed? It's OK, take a big deep breath and repeat after me: "managing my resources and tasks can be easier". Feeling better? Nope? That's normal. Running a business, especially when you have a whole class of contractors to manage, keep up with and prioritize, is exhausting.

We know...why do you think we built Allocate anyway? Keep reading to find out how task-tracking software makes management easier.

In the Loop

Keeping your team and resources organized is one of the major reasons for using task-tracking software. If you had to constantly keep people in the loop, you'd be spending most of your day sending emails and obnoxiously CCing the whole team on every single one. That's what you call not getting anything done, and wasting the time of your hard-working team as well. Resource and task-tracking software lets your team know what's going without having to babysit anyone.

Missed Milestones

When deadlines are approaching, you have to be able to count on your team to hunker down and get the job done. If you weren't using resource and task-tracking software you'd be resorting to writings thing down in a notebook. This is totally cool if you're a company of one (have you seen that Evernote Moleskine?), but what if you're juggling eight contractors? How would they know what to do and in what priority they should do it?

Consider for a minute, the idea of setting milestones in the first place. You may not have thought to even create milestones for project. Having mini goals (aka milestones) spread throughout the project keeps your contractors focused and your customers happy.
Task management software can make you think about your projects in new ways -- like being able to see all your available business resources on one screen. Having this level of overview is empowering and can make tackling the next project easier.

Reminders to Remember

Does Pam have the latest copy of the report? You were supposed to have it ready for her by the end of day! Dang, now Pam's got to scramble around to get it before her big meeting. Having someone or something remind you can really save the day.

Reminders may seem trivial, but if you were able to capture all the things you'd like to be reminded of on a daily basis, your brain would be a whole lot less cluttered with mental post-it notes. Task-tracking software consolidates your to-dos so that you can focus on everything else.

Doing the Right Thing at the Right Time

You can't shop for groceries while you're at the home improvement store just like you can't assign Pamela new work if she's on vacation in Belize for the next two weeks. But you don't know what you can't do unless you have a grasp on the availability of your contractors, or anyone you delegate to.

Task-tracking and resource management software can give you the peace of mind and information to make better money making business decisions. What other ways has task-tracking software made managing your business easier? Let us know in the comments, that's something we're pretty darn interested in.

7 Business Resource Management Tips To Save You Money

Business resource management is part of the day-to-day management of running a business. And everything you do in your business, from the way you manage your time to the contractors you keep on payroll, have an effect on your monetary resources.
  • The way you pay your bills (payroll software, staff, etc.)
  • Receiving money from clients (invoicing, payment processing, etc.)
  • What you spend money on (contractors, supplies, etc.)
Understanding how to manage these assets can make or break you business. Below are seven business resource management tips to save you money. The order of importance may depend on your priorities:

1. Watch Out for Bank Fees

These days it seems like there's a bank fee for just about everything. Whether it's a fee for maintaining a monthly minimum or over-drafting your account, it's important to know what fees you may incur. Have your bank give you a list of fees. You may even want to switch banks if you feel like these are too high or unreasonable. If you have several business accounts with monthly fees and are only using a couple of them, close the extras.

2. Make It Easy for Clients to Pay You

Technically this is a money-making tip and not a money-saving tip. But, if you're making money aren't you also saving money?

Many businesses still don't take advantage of the number of payment services out there. These services (Paypal, Invoiceable, Harvest, etc.) make it easy for your clients to pay with debit and credit cards, and even automatically send invoices when they're late. These services often cost money and/or take a percentage of the amount charged, so be sure to read the fine print and use them wisely. The real benefit of these types of services is the increase in cash flow. The faster and more consistent, the better.

3. Stop Spending Money on Dining Out

It's fun to be the boss and take the team out for a meal. Businesses can get caught up spending needless amounts of money on food. Take a step back and think, do you really need to have Friday's lunch catered? Food is one of the worst, least deductible tax write-offs, so maybe instead of every week, you have Friday's lunch catered once a month. You could save $200-$500 a month! It's important to reward your team when they have worked really hard, but make sure it's a prize, not just an expected perk.

4. Go Easy on the Supplies

Purchasing pens, paper, copy machines and other miscellaneous supplies can get out of hand very quickly. Be strict about the budget you set for supplies. Think about what supplies you really need to do business. You may not need that $2000 copy machine after all.

5. Skip the Booth & Just Attend

Ok, it's cool to have a booth at your industry's biggest conference but they are a an infamously huge waste of money when done half-hearted and without a full-on lead-generating strategy. You essentially pay an exorbitant amount of money to have your team confined to one place during the show. At least part of your team always needs to be at the booth.

It's true that some networking may occur within the confines of your booth, but if you and your team were in five different places at once, you'd have better business development opportunities by not having to babysit the booth. Just going to a conference is expensive. Save thousands by skipping the booth and just attending. Be a bag sponsor if you want.

6. Set an Example

As the saying goes, "Be the change in the world". Culture within a company is set by executives but it's also set within individual departments and teams. Set the example for your team. Demonstrate how you use company resources and your team will follow.

7. Be a Better Scientist

"We've always done it this way because that's how we've always done it". That statement gets repeated at hundreds of businesses on weekly basis. Most businesses have forgotten how to experiment.

Every company is guilty. You have a repeatable process that works, you already have a relationship with one vendor. Why should you change any of it?

You should always be striving for the best, but the unknown may be better and cheaper. To start experimenting you only need to ask yourself this one question, "Is there a better way of doing this?". It could a faster way or a cheaper way. It could be as simple as using a new software tool to help give you better perspective of what your team is up to.

Be curious, try new things and you'll make discoveries that benefit your business by saving them time and money.

These seven business resource management tips are just the beginning. Every company is unique so we hope we've sparked your imagination. Business resource management is about getting creative with the way your company uses its time, money and effort.

What is Resource Planning?

What is resource planning? Good question. Depending on whom you're talking to, resource planning can mean something different to just about everyone. So for this article we'll just discuss resource planning in general terms.

A great way to think of resource planning is the organization of people, equipment and other critical assets to complete a task. This could be a task for school, organization or in the workplace. It's used for managing many simple tasks and also complex projects, like building a spaceship. Most of the time you won't need to plan out simple tasks and projects, but when things start to get complicated you'll be glad you had a simple to use resource planning tool like allocatehq.com.

Resource planning is most essential for when you're in charge of a time-sensitive project that requires a team of people, lots of equipment and has multiple phases before the project is complete. Below are few key areas resource planning can come into play. We'll be using a couple different real world scenarios to illustrate these points.

Gauging Bandwidth

Imagine you're the production director of a video production studio. You have been asked to submit a proposal for seven 30-second commercials in four weeks. This could mean a great deal of money to your firm, but does your company have the bandwidth to take on such a large short-term project?

Before submitting a proposal, you should probably find out what the availability of your production crew is, what production facilities are open and what equipment is unavailable. You need to have all of this information at your fingertips in a simple organized system.

Using a tool to manage all of these resources can help you determine which projects you have the bandwidth for. Because there's nothing worse than taking the time and resources to bid for project you can't complete because you overlooked what resources are available. This will save you time and money.

Avoid Losing Money & Making Clients Mad

A video production company is just one example of how a company can use resource planning in the discovery phase of a project.

Let's now pretend you're already knee deep into a project and you have a situation pop up where you need to act fast to keep everything running smoothly while keeping the client or customer off your back.

Pretend for a minute that you're now the construction site manager for the newest Dunkin' Donuts to be built in the great city of Providence.

You're three days away from the building being complete when one of your flat bed trucks breaks down.

This is a big problem. You have to deliver the Dunkin' Donuts sign for the outside of the building. This could keep the entire job from being complete for an extra couple of days if you have one single resource to transport that sign.

By more effectively planning your resources, you can reroute a secondary flat bed truck that was on its way back from another job site, preventing a needless delay and keeping your client pleased! And we all need another Dunkin' Donuts, right?

Keeping Contractors Happy

So you've saved the day in both your video production and construction companies but there is another area that resource planning can have a huge impact on. Keeping your contractors happy.

Much like a maitre d' in a restaurant, you need to spread the work around to keep your waiters (in your case, contractors) happy. Resource planning lets you know who's doing what and who's available to handle something new.

Steady work keeps contractors happy and more reliable and makes your organization run like a well-oiled machine. It makes business sense to use resource planning.

So we hope we answered your question. It's a topic that's near and dear to our hearts. How does resource planning fit into your workflow? How does it save you money? Lets us know in the comments!