WorkflowMax is an end to end project management software, aimed at small to medium businesses. With an affordable price point, WorkflowMax aims to have a broad range of features that appeals to a variety of businesses. With the addition of its Lead Management add on, WorkflowMax acts as the one stop shop for the entire professional services process, and as a Xero company, its integration to the accounting software helps you manage your business’ finances.
Streamlined workflow + lead manager
As the name suggests, WorkflowMax’s key strength is in the process flow of work from an opportunity, all the way to a fully invoiced job. Lead Manager, for an additional $15 per month to the subscription, works in tandem with the client database to act as a basic sales pipeline manager. Tracking prospect clients, leads, building quotes, and assigning BD related tasks to staff members is available within the software with an ease of use.
A strength of WorkflowMax is its level of customisation, and this is best highlighted through its capacity to create custom fields across multiple modules, including clients and jobs. You can also customize templates for quotes, purchase orders, invoices and job forms using Word.
Jobs themselves are built on the foundations of tasks (for time tracking) and costs (expense tracking). As you build out tasks and costs within a job, so too does the financial budgets and visibility of a job grow. Jobs also facilitate management of to-do items, milestones and key dates, as well as assigning specific tasks to staff members for scheduling.
Limited scheduling
It is worth noting however, that the scheduling of staff members time within WorkflowMax is limited. While there is a scheduling module, it’s flexibility and usability are lacking. Scheduling relies exclusively on managers assigning start and end dates to tasks and if scheduling over multiple days, task times can only be broken up by equal proportions. If this is a necessity for your business, consider an integration with a third-party scheduling tool such as Better Scheduling or Plan Right.
A commonality throughout WorkflowMax is the tendency to be able to enter data in multiple ways, and time sheeting is no exception. Time can be added via the time tracker (either from browser or in app), as a manual entry from within the job, or even added in bulk through the weekly timesheet view. The Premium Plan for WorkflowMax also allows for ad hoc time to be added without a task, adding to the flexibility in how you enter your timesheets.
Flexible invoicing
Similarly, invoicing flexibility is a notable strength of WorkflowMax, made better still by recent enhancements to its Xero integration. Invoices can be billed directly off time and costs (while still maintaining the ability to write up or down individual entries) or you can choose to bill a self-determined total or percentage of the quote.
Despite being a Xero product, WorkflowMax’s integration with Xero is also not without limitations. While offering flexibility on how invoices ultimately appear in Xero, don’t expect client databases to be mirrored between the 2 systems unless you have put in the effort to configure the system in the way that best suits your needs. Ultimately, plan for WorkflowMax to be your single source for client information. Configuration of the system, and preparation of the client database, takes time to be successful.
Comprehensive reporting
The report builder in WorkflowMax is perhaps its best asset, as it provides a flexibility other software’s don’t. Almost every field, across every module can be extracted through the report builder. While you can’t access every field in a single report (there are multiple report types with different offerings), a simple CSV export allows you to conduct a deeper analysis of its data.
WorkflowMax’s greatest limitation is its rigidness and lack of flexibility for modern working styles. Its foundations as a traditional project management tool is well constructed, however there has been little development in areas that don’t fit directly into its intended workflow. While most prevalent in the scheduling limitations, the flexibility to customize dashboards, a complex purchase order process and restrictive tracking of tasks and WIP all hinder its status as an easy to use tool; without adequate training and a detailed setup, you may find it difficult to succeed using WorkflowMax.
When it’s preferred use suits your business, WorkflowMax is an effective project management tool focusing on providing you extensive financial visibility. Be prepared to put in some time setting up WorkflowMax. As a system that works best when you follow its rules, taking the time to learn them is worth the effort.
Have questions?
We’d be happy to answer them or take you through features of WorkflowMax in more detail. Or, if you’re wondering if another solution might be better for you, we’ve also done the hard yards for you and taken a look at other project management platforms, including: Xero Projects, Harvest & Forecast, Streamtime, ActiveCollab, Zoho Projects, Scoro and Accelo.
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