WorkflowMax is a powerful job management application that can give your business a tremendous boost in productivity and provide new insights into job profitability, sales and resourcing. If you’ve attempted to set up WorkflowMax yourself you may have found that all these powerful features and the level of customisation available can make it hard to get your head around at first.
The following three tips can help small businesses who are trying to set up WorkflowMax themselves or want to give WorkflowMax a solid test drive using these tips to getting up and running quickly. These shortcuts are particularly applicable for businesses that don’t currently have a lot of formal processes in place. If this sounds like you, then WorkflowMax will help you build some structure around your workflow, and as your business grows you’re using a system that can grow with you.
Tasks
Tasks drive everything in the WorkflowMax process. Tasks are used to set up quotes, set up jobs and manage workflow, for entering timesheets, to compare budgeted time/costs to actual time/billings, and can be used for invoicing. Because tasks are used in so many different parts of WorkflowMax it can be tempting to include too many when creating a task list.
Keep your task list simple, for example by limiting these to simply ‘billable work’ and ‘non-billable’ time or your top level service descriptions. As you become more proficient with WorkflowMax and want to get a more detailed breakdown of where time is spent you can add additional tasks to the list that include different tasks that make up your project/s or other non-billable work such as Travel Time, Admin, Sales.
Templates
Two common mistakes occur with templates. Firstly, not realising that the quotation and invoice templates can be highly customisable.
Secondly, not realising that there are basic sample templates that can be quickly edited with your branding.If you don’t at least set up a sample template WorkflowMax will default to it’s system generated quote, invoice, or purchase order documents which can be quickly customised to show basic information.
However, you can quickly set up your own custom templates using the samples provided. You can set these up from ‘Business tab’ > ‘Settings’ > ‘Custom Templates’. Refer to the help page here on: Custom Templates.
With some Microsoft Word skills you can easily add your business’ logo and details to the template and upload to WorkflowMax. You can also delete unwanted columns such as ‘Qty’ or ‘Unit Price’ columns without too much difficulty. Much more advanced customisation can also be done on the templates to make them look close to or exactly like your existing proposals and documents, however we suggest engaging experienced WorkflowMax specialists (likes us!) for this level of customisation to save yourself a lot of time and frustration.
Just Start
Just get started. Unless you’re migrating from an existing workflow and job management system there’s little harm in starting to use WorkflowMax for all your new jobs and projects. Once you’ve set up a basic task list create a new job, set the start and due date for the job, add your staff and start entering your timesheets in WorkflowMax. If you incur any job related costs or disbursements you can record these under the Costs tab. Once a job is completed you can update the job status and raise an invoice against the job.
Congratulations! You’ve now used WorkflowMax to manage your jobs and deadlines, track your time and costs, and invoice your clients.
This is just scratching the surface of what WorkflowMax can do. Next steps would be to start entering in your job budgets by issuing a Quote before converting this into a Job, doing this will give you Budget vs Actual figures when reviewing the Job Financial Summary.
As your business grows and you hire more staff you might consider breaking down your task lists into more detailed tasks so you can see how much time is being spent on different aspects of the project. You might also utilise features like advanced document templates, job templates or custom fields to save you and your team more time.
Whether your business has been trialling WorkflowMax or you set it up yourself and have been using it for a while, Business Continuum can assist you and your business in getting the most out of it. We can assist you with:
If you require any assistance with the above, or have any other questions about WorkflowMax or other cloud applications please feel free to give us a call to discuss how we can help you.
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