#TICK TIME TRACKING BASECAMP HOW TO#
#TICK TIME TRACKING BASECAMP SOFTWARE#

Start with a blank project, choose a meaningful name to reflect its purpose, different for each client and easy to recognize, then indicate an estimated amount of time needed to accomplish that job. It gives all the necessary tools to help companies remain profitable and lets them create or import projects and tasks, track time against budgets and get detailed reports. We’re convinced it’s a worthwhile investment that will scale with us as our company grows.Tick is a reliable online app that aims to improve work productivity.

#TICK TIME TRACKING BASECAMP HOW TO#

It’s the byproduct of pouring so much blood, sweat, and tears into learning how to use the labyrinthine software. Most importantly, we have the data to support the reports we need to truly analyze our operations and create efficiencies. If you’re done, you move it to “Review” and leave a comment and enter your time. When you move it back you need to leave a comment and enter your time. You move an Issue from “Standby” to “In Progress” to indicate you’re working on it. There are no reminders to “check the guidelines.” It’s far more binary than Basecamp. Nobody needs to ask whether or not to leave a comment on an Issue. All of Jira’s complexities and details resulted in a setup that truly enhances operations. Our Initial Impressions of JiraĮveryone is excited that the system is up and running. It’ll just take a long time to figure everything out. Jira can be molded into just about whatever you want (granted you’re willing to also mold your company around Jira a bit). So it was a long, trial-and-error-filled road to education. The ones who seem to have things organized tend to be a bit too busy to spend time in support forums. There’s a great community of users, but for the most part they’re all as lost as you are. YouTube videos exist, but they’re all vague and academic.

However, the price-point doesn’t represent how expensive it is to figure out how to use Jira. We love Jira’s price-point and pricing model. That doesn’t even cover Add-ons (and figuring out how they work). Before we felt comfortable moving our team onto the new system we believed we had to develop a rudimentary understanding of: Well, Uncle Ben hit the nail on the head. What did Uncle Ben tell Spider-Man? With great flexibility comes great complexity…” or something…? Every other system we’ve used or analyzed is more or less functional out-of-the-box. No need to mince words – Jira is a beast. This is an excellent fit for small companies like ours, but with our plans our chief concern was that we would be limited in the future by the Active Collab’s rigidity.

#TICK TIME TRACKING BASECAMP SOFTWARE#

In our eyes, the software was the victim of trying to be everything to everyone. We just found this a bit too restrictive.

We ruled Active Collab out, however, because of the strict way projects were managed and the expectation that accounting and customer management should take place within the system. The price point was appealing and they recently released a Service Desk feature. The runner-up in this process was Active Collab. Company representation and community support fell short for a few as well.

Most were missing a Service Desk feature. All had their own strengths and weaknesses. We looked into all of the big names: Smartsheet, Trello, Podio, Wrike, Mavenlink, Asana, Zoho, etc. Still, we have some ambitious things lined up for this year that require a rock-solid foundation.

Basecamp, Tick, Workstack, Zendesk… a lot of overhead for a company our size. Not perfect, but it was helpful.Īt this point, the combined cost was really starting to add up. We also played with the new Workstack Beta quite a bit for resource planning. Still, Basecamp’s lack of workflows and constraints meant it wasn’t the right tool for a fully-realized system. Tick was giving us information, and the time tracking interface was straightforward enough. We considered Zendesk, but ultimately balked at the idea of using yet another isolated system. The catalyst was our desire to implement a Service Desk for client requests. It was an improvement, but ultimately we found the two systems were too disjointed to allow us to collect any actionable data. We go through a lot of projects each month, and a learning curve stood in the way of our clients using that system, which kept us from taking advantage of one of Basecamp’s most valuable features.Įventually, we started using Tick for time tracking. For that past 3+ years, we’ve used Basecamp, which is essentially a glorified and accessible version of email.

Tick time tracking basecamp