Our most recommended Workflow management app

In our role as cloud app integrators and implementation experts, WorkflowMax is an essential app in Link Solutions' toolkit. We recommend it over and above any other workflow management app, and use it daily within our own business. The depth of features is significant and can be easily adapted to suit most business processes. The flow from lead management right through delivery and then to invoicing saves countless hours of administration and can deliver significant improvements to service delivery. Being a Xero company, the integration with Xero is understandably robust and extensive, and other useful add-on integrations are available. For example, at Link, we use Zendesk to manage our support tickets, and we're able to track our time in Zendesk and have this flow through to WorkflowMax timesheets with associated notes for reporting and billing. Put simply, we think WorkflowMax is a great system that offers exceptional value for money.

Pros

* Flexible and extensive feature set that can manage most business processes

* General ease of use - while there are some traps for beginners, these are understable given the depth of features available

* It's a Xero company, and benefits from the association in terms of a strong integration, customer support standards, and ongoing development

* Pricing is excellent and suits a range of businesses from small operators through to large enterprises

* Significant job and task templating abilities allow multiple activity streams to be systematised within one application

* Powerful reporting engine with the ability to extend with custom reports

Cons

* Retentions and variations can be difficult to manage for construction companies

* Inventory management is non-existent, which while understandable in a workflow management app does limit use for service-based firms that also provide product

* The mobile app could do with further extensions to the range of features available

* If you are looking for a fully featured CRM that you need to integrate with a email marketing system (like Mailchimp) you may need to use a standalone app

Functionality & Reporting

Workflow max helps to solve the issue of effective invoicing of time worked on each client. Workflow max has also helped our firm when it comes to GST time - the way workflow max integrates with Xero makes filing GST returns with Inland Revenue very simple, and lets you easily keep track of GST returns and to make sure that all returns have been filed before the due date.

Pros

- Workflowmax has the ability to let the user create and design their own reports, which can come in very handy for workflow planning purposes. Saves staff all trying to navigate through a single spreadsheet!
- This is an effective program to record staff hours, which also allocates your time entries to the jobs you are working on, which helps when it comes time to bill clients.
- The tax alerts on the dashboard are a good way to double check tax returns after they have been assessed by IRD, which is a good reminder to check any returns that have been assessed as different as it raises a red flag and makes you look into it.

Cons

The custom reporting can be a bit hard to navigate around, especially for any newcomers to the system.

It does what it says on the tin. Work-Flow-MAX

I am the director of Right Brain Insights, and CFO for a company called T3 Group – T3 Facility Services Pty Ltd. I help SMEs use data to clarify their strategic direction and boost their business performance. In the case of T3 Group, that’s what we’ve been able to do with WorkflowMax. Eleven months ago, the only thing that could be vaguely understood was total sales to a client. However, in order to understand the cost base and truly drive profit, and link it back to our goals, we needed to be able to break down jobs, and their cost, as well as give the guys one site and the guys in the office something that could allow them to be far more efficient and far more effective at what they needed to do. We looked at WorkflowMax, GeoOp and Connect2Field. WorkflowMax is just a standout, across these in terms of its reporting, its connection with Xero, and its detail. We needed to have really good insights over our cash flow going forward. We use WorkflowMax to strip out a pipeline, so we can see cashflow into the future based on job activity. Our target used to be $50,000 a month, it’s now $325,000 minimum and rising. We would not have been able to hit that growth without WorkflowMax. There used to be a fairly substantial lag in invoicing. It used to be around a 14-day delay from the end of a job to actually invoicing it. That’s come down to basically 24, at most 48 hours. We pretty much invoice as soon as the job’s finished. That’s been a really, really tight process and something that’s really cool when you link WorkflowMax to Xero. In January our accounts receivable days was roughly 65 and our accounts payable was roughly 40. We’ve now switched that where our accounts receivable, on average, is about 45 days and our payable is about 48. So being able to switch that and stay on top of it has had a really, really powerful impact. We’re just becoming more organised. So we are doing things far more efficiently. We are, through a system like this, becoming more account

Pros

- Customised reporting & data fields
- Real-time tracking
- Xero connection
- Pricing (so much cheaper than GeoOp & Connect 2 Field at the time we researched)
- Backed by Xero

Cons

- Dashboard design. Could be cleaner, maybe customisable
- Not life or death, but stronger connection on the cost side. i.e. 'spend money' type transactions linking to Xero.

Value for Money Time and Project Management System

As Certified Implementation Partners, we have implemented and trained WorkflowMax for over sixty clients in the UK. Industries have included Creative Agencies, Architects & Engineers, Ecologists, Training Companies and General Consultancy firms.

Pros

WorkflowMax is highly flexible and every client will tend to use it slightly differently. Some of the key things our clients like about WorkflowMax

1. Easy time entry - Especially the weekly time grid where you can then easily track who has/hasn't submitted time if using the 'Submit Time'sheet' feature.
2. The ability to develop attractive quotes and proposals.
3. Being able to pull processes and systems together in a centralised location. Often clients are holding project information in lots of different locations/spreadsheets around the office.
4. Huge flexibility through the custom reporting and being able to quickly see Project Profitability.
5. 'Talks' nicely to Xero your Accounting Software, sending through invoices and supplier invoices.
6. Great Value for Money when taking into account the breadth of features.

Cons

1. Capacity Planning. There is a Staff Availability grid, but time must be clearly allocated to staff and tasks for this to provide meaningful and accurate information.
2. Expenses Tracking. There are various options for Expense Tracking such as bulk purchase orders, but could be clearer and easier to use.

Good product, however timer has bugs

If the support team fixes the timer issue, this would be the project management tool to go with hands down.

Pros

I like how the product has a timer that you can time your tasks against with start and stop timer functionality and see how much time you have spent on your project and each task. I like that it has Xero integration as well.

Cons

I don't like that the timer has bugs where maybe one out of every ten times that you attempt to stop the timer after finishing timing a job, it completely forgets the time that was recorded against it and resets the time to a lower time for some unknown reason. I have contacted support about this issue countless times but have always been pushed away even after following requests to send through supporting testing data.

Useful for project costing for an SME

Using an app to enter hours saves us time - we are a small company so a large ERP system isn't appropriate. Workflow Max isn't perfect, but it does what we need - let's us do project costing relatively easily while integrating with the accounts system we use. There are lots of 'help' videos easily found to show you how to do things.

Pros

The phone app makes it easy to enter time, wherever you are, and the admins can see easily who has completed and submitted time and who hasn't.

Cons

The reports aren't as customisable as we'd like - you can see that it's built from database fields from different tables, but only certain combinations of fields are available and it takes a while to work out which basic report is the one you need.
There are no 'sub jobs' or cost categories, so we need to use subfolders to categorise costs, or separate out project phases, which is a bit clunky.

WorkflowMax is very user-friendly

I am the Director of Melbourne-based commercial fit-out and property maintenance company, Symmetry Commercial. After migrating from MYOB to Xero, we were looking for a work scheduling and quotation software, and that’s when we discovered WorkflowMax. For us, the beauty of WorkflowMax has been creating a really tight process around purchasing and sending online purchase orders. Typically, paperwork goes missing, emails go missing. But now it’s so much easier; we can just log on and see all the information in one place. If we need to re-submit a quote or a purchase order, it’s all there. The biggest thing for us is the quotation side of things. What’s terrific is that this information then feeds directly through to Xero to create an invoice, which cuts down on invoicing time. Functionality was a focus for us; we didn’t want something that was going to be too difficult to use. But WorkflowMax is very user-friendly; we’ve had new people start here and it’s been really easy for them to pick up. WorkflowMax has been great for us in the sense that it has got so much scope. We were looking for something that could grow with us; as the company grows we can actually expand our use of the system. WorkflowMax is only going to get better for service-based industries because they are specialist to that particular type of software. When our business goes to that next level, and we have got more people out there doing project estimating, then I know there are those functionalities within WorkflowMax, and it’s something that we’re excited to explore.

Pros

- Inexpensive
- Programmers are constantly improving WFM
- Seamless compatibility with Xero
- Easy to use and intuitive. Easy to train new comers on.

Cons

- Would prefer if it was a bit more Building/ Construction industry centric

WorkflowMax provides an excellent platform for a business wanting to do time cost recording.

Easy to use

Pros

WorkflowMax has excellent reporting and export functions which allows for production of meaningful management reporting. Client profitability is easy to calculate and more importantly, the productivity of team members. An excellent overall reporting system.

Cons

Navigating from one client to another can be cumbersome. Also, unless the different levels of jobs, tasks, and activities are set up properly, this can result of reports which provide incorrect information. In comparison to CCH iFirm, I think WorkflowMax have a few edits to perform to bring this up to standard

WorkflowMax has changed the way we work

I’m a Partner at Greengage - a London based sustainability and environmental consultancy providing advice to a range of different clients on how they can integrate sustainability into their core operations as well as making their developments more environmentally responsible. We used to employ a cumbersome system of spreadsheets for time & project management that would often involve duplicate information. It was not a system we could use to generate meaningful information about how much cost had gone into a job, or how much time or budget we had left and how we we were tracking a fee. When we switched to WorkflowMax, I was surprised how easy it was to get started. All our staff found it very simple, intuitive. The online video tutorials and the support team helped us immensely by answering all of our queries. WorkflowMax provides us the opportunity to run our own reports with a very powerful custom report builder in a very easy and intuitive way. As a consultancy, its having that information in hand to be able to go back to clients where we are with individual projects. The way WorkflowMax enables us to tailor the information has saved us 70-80% of the time we used to spend on that system. In terms of return on investment, WorkflwoMax is a no-brainer. We can recoup the invest on a monthly basis by just having one more hour of consistency. As a business owner, WorkflowMax makes my life easy by having all the information in one place - so we can see where we are at in terms of projects, we can see who is working on it, we can see where we are with invoicing, we can see how much money in the budget is left over and much more. There is less admin involved in the business now. WorkflowMax has given us an unfair advantage to stay ahead of our competitors. Highly recommended for forward-thinking service businesses.

Integral to our project and time tracking

Pros

Easy to use similar to Xero accounting - integrates with accounting. Good mobile app and great reports. We're finding the leads and quotes very useful - especially for keeping track of projects and potential work, and converting to real jobs. Workflowmax has allowed us to improve our productivity as well as tracking work and hours that we previously would have missed.

Cons

A little bit of difficulty linking to Xero accounting - mainly due to our awkward setup. Looking forward to a smoother link between these apps.

Streamlined job processes

Pros

Workflowmax is a fantastic job mangement program that has saved APT a lot of time in book keeping. The software covers our complete workflow from Quoting and Scoping a Job, Managing the Job and Invoicing. The Stopwatch feature for time keeping adds a level of detail which makes it hard for cutomers to argue - everything is recorded in real time.

WFM allows document storage and collaboration straight to the job, all emails, files and notes can be accessed by anyone working on the job - no searching for lost information.

Cons

There are a few integrations that are available for WFM (eg Xero) which work really well but It would be great if WFM had Zapier integration.

Great product, such a timesaver

As the director of Threerooms, a graphic design agency in Nottingham, UK - I was watching my company struggle to grow because the admin demands were becoming overwhelming. We used to have job bags and job sheets, keep the record of time spent on paper — thats just seem like a historic way of doing things. But since we implemented WorkflowMax, it’s been smooth sailing. We use WorkflowMax to manage all of our projects from the start to the finish. The great thing about WorkflowMax is that everything is integrated into one package. I can deal with the quoting part of the process, through to actually managing of the project, managing time, budgets and then move through to purchase orders and invoices -- everything in one system. Because everything is integrated in one system, I can convert a quote into a live job by just pressing one button. When the job is complete — we can just turn it into an invoice, again just at a click of a button, and then seamlessly pushes the invoice into our accounting software Xero. The integration with Xero is just brilliant really. Being able to just seamlessly push sales and supplier invoices straight out of workflowmax into xero is excellent. It gives us a great overall solution for the business. Together, WorkflowMax & Xero must have saved us thousands and thousands of pounds. As a business owner, there is so much to think about — I think WorkflowMax has really given me the ability to hand over some of those responsibilities to my staff. They can use WorkflowMax to manage the project independently without any input from myself. Its given me time to work on the business rather than in the business, which is what every sort of manager really wants.