Set Your Team Up for Success with ActiveCollab 8

Say hello to ActiveCollab version 8!

Over the past couple of years, we've challenged ourselves to turn ActiveCollab into something more than a project management tool. We aimed to create a space where service businesses would manage all their work, people, clients, financials, and more.

So we listened. To your feedback, to your requests, and your needs. We incorporated years’ worth of information into our software, so that you'd get exactly what you wanted. A simple, yet powerful productivity and collaboration workspace helping you thrive.

With a redesigned interface and over 100 new and improved features, ActiveCollab version 8 is equipped to help you onboard talent, improve teamwork, manage clients and cash flow, analyze performance, and scale.

Keep reading to find out more about key upgrades, what they mean for you, and how to get started using ActiveCollab 8!

What’s New in ActiveCollab 8?

We significantly improved the existing and added new sections, including People, Projects, Workload and Capacity, Time Management, Calendar, Invoicing, and Reports.

These sections, as well as the entire workspace, are enriched with features you can use to optimize your workflows, overcome challenges, and grow your business.

Let’s see how exactly ActiveCollab 8 can help you.

Centralized Communication for Better Collaboration and Productivity

Broken communication is one of the reasons many projects fail. People often struggle to keep up with everything that’s said and shared via email or apps. This often leads to unclear expectations, missed deadlines, and even conflict.

ActiveCollab can help you centralize communication, ensure transparency, and improve efficiency.

Bring your in-house team, as well as external collaborators, such as freelancers, to your ActiveCollab workspace, and build high-performing, cross-project teams that deliver great results. Invite clients for faster feedback and approvals.

Thanks to Chat, Comments, Discussions, and Notes, you’ll keep all your communications in one place, so nothing slips through the cracks. Your team will be in the know and on the same page at all times.

Comment on tasks for updates and specs. For quick updates and catch-ups, as well as friendly texts, there’s always Chat. One of the advantages of Chat is that you can create one-on-one or group chats, which helps you discuss particular topics with a single member or the entire team.

If you have company events, kickoff meetings or recurring team calls, you can schedule them in Calendar, and even add them to participants’ workload.

You can also use ActiveCollab to store all kinds of documents and files necessary for your team to work efficiently. For example, you can upload employee handbooks and standard operating procedure docs, keep meeting minutes, and have project discussions to brainstorm and troubleshoot. Help your team stay up to date with the latest trends with helpful resources, such as market research PDFs, how-to guides, and various reports that can improve their knowledge and skillset.

People and Workload for Efficient Resource Planning and Workload Management

Do project schedules give you nightmares? How many times have people on your team complained about having too much to do while others are sitting idle? What about conflicting task due dates and lacking resources?

If you want to avoid these or even worse problems, you need to manage workload more effectively.

ActiveCollab helps you optimally distribute workload among your team members and make the best use of your resources by enabling you to:

• Define people’s capacity, availability, job types, and rates, to delegate tasks and plan capacity accordingly,

• Evaluate workload across your organization, to make necessary adjustments (break down a task into smaller chunks, reassign tasks, reassess priorities or include more people),

• Track and manage time, including time off, which helps you monitor progress, deadlines, estimates, performance, and more,

• Adapt to change smoothly as all changes made are instantly reflected across your workspace, for you to react right away (someone had to take a day off, someone asks for more time to complete a task, etc.),

• Optimize resource utilization by monitoring working hours, assigned tasks, and time spent, so you could detect areas of improvement, high and low performers, and even discover bottlenecks, and prevent burnout,

• Analyze insights to improve workflows, increase productivity, and create a thriving workplace,

• Prepare for and onboard new people when things get busy, thanks to insightful Workload and Reports, as well as free Virtual Users, a feature that lets you create people placeholders before real users arrive.

Expenses, Reports, and Invoices for Cash Flow Management

Due to today’s unpredictable economy and competitive markets, businesses like yours are often faced with a major challenge: budget. Defining prices, predicting costs, creating estimates, and ensuring profitability are only some of the pain points linked directly to money.

ActiveCollab gives you tools to better manage your budget, even when things are uncertain.

You can define everyone’s internal hourly rates, so you always know how much someone’s work will cost you. This information, as well as time estimates, past time entries, job type rates, will give you a benchmark against which to create a pricing strategy and charge for your services.

You’ll be able to track all your expenses, monitor them as projects progress, and prevent going over the budget without prior approval. You can create alerts to stay on top of things, and refer to Assignment Dashboards for reports and more concrete and insightful financial information.

This way, you’ll be able to adjust prices in line with demand. You’ll know who your highest-paying clients are, which types of work are the most profitable, and make more important strategic decisions.

With ActiveCollab Invoices, you can create and then turn approved quotes into projects, define a pricing model, create, and send out invoices in a few. Your clients will be able to pay you more quickly, which will significantly reduce the risk of late payments—another unfortunate thing troubling so many service businesses. (Luckily, we also have payment reminders!)

Client Access for Enhanced Client Communication

Are you looking for an inexpensive solution to manage clients, strengthen your relationships with them, and streamline approvals?

In ActiveCollab, you can create an unlimited number of client seats free of charge.

Keeping your clients in your ActiveCollab workspace lets you administer your interactions with them more efficiently. For example, your clients can provide input on project deliverables right there, which will help you get rid of back-and-forth emails, and reduce the time waiting for client feedback. With a transparent way of doing business, your clients will trust you more, making the likelihood of their becoming loyal ones much greater.

If your clients want to be more involved in projects, you can enable them to create and be assigned tasks. With increased visibility and instant notifications, this will make approvals even faster. On the other hand, if a client has a continual influx of requests, allowing them to create tasks will reduce your team’s workload, and eliminate unnecessary tasks from their to-do list.

Additionally, you can make use of available ActiveCollab features to create a client database to keep track of all your existing clients, as well as your prospects and leads. Have a Project page specifically for your potential clients, from where you can track them down the pipeline. Another option is to use Virtual Users to create lead accounts, and activate them with a single email once the leads are ready to continue.

You can always refer to the People section for a full overview of all your client accounts. You can see their projects, tasks, and activities. Detect idle clients and prevent churn by following up in case you notice someone’s been inactive for a while.

Similarly, use Invoices to track invoices and payments. See who pays on time, who’s late, and adjust your communication and operational strategies accordingly. If a client is struggling financially, it might be a potential opportunity to show up for them by negotiating a payment solution. It can easily make them stay with you much longer. Alternatively, discuss the situation to ensure you’re not operating at a loss.

Reports for Progress Tracking, Business Analytics, and Forecasting

How can you demonstrate performance, define strategies, and prove your know-how without accurate data to support your statements?

ActiveCollab gives you insights into all your activities, including tasks and projects, time spent, profitability, expenses, and more.

The Reports section is getting better and better. One of the major improvements are Task Reports, with the option to save filters as presets so you can create custom reports in a click.

Your Assignments Dashboard displays everything you need to measure your work, evaluate campaigns, and report on achievements. Use the date to analyze key metrics and detect areas of improvement. See whether you’re frequently going over the set budget, and whether your team is delivering output on time.

Create different types of reports using filters for customization and clarity, and get to know the ins and outs of your business financial and team performance. Decide whether you need to hire more people, examine your revenue streams, predict future expenses, and see if you need to increase your rates to stay competitive.

The best of all? It’s so simple to create reports in ActiveCollab. You won’t get overwhelmed by the number of steps it takes to visualize data or confused by an endless amount of metrics. Instead, you can focus on the most important aspects of your business metrics, so you can act concretely and with confidence.

Time Tracking, Timesheets, and Calendar for Increased Efficiency and Better Time Management

ActiveCollab can’t add more hours to your workday (and we don’t want to), but we can help you better manage your schedule, prioritize, and coordinate your activities so that you and your team can work smarter in a less stressful environment.

Our time-tracking tools are top-notch when it comes to reliability and functionality. You can track time spent on tasks and projects, add time records retrospectively, and use past entries for future estimates. This information is vital for your pricing options, invoicing, as well as financial planning.

You can use individual timesheets to help your team members better organize their time and work more efficiently. See which tasks require more resources, who’s struggling with timely delivery, and whether you can keep up with clients’ demands.

In Calendar, you can view all important meetings, events, tasks, as well as task reminders, and people who are off, which helps you maximize everyone’s time, distribute workload, and act in case of an emergency. Say you have a high-priority task due today, the assignee is out sick. With ActiveCollab Calendar, you’ll detect such things in a glance, so you can reassign the task, and still manage to successfully complete it.

If you’re using a particular time management method, you can set it up in your ActiveCollab workspace. Use available features, such as timer, task labels, reminders, and different views, to ensure maximum efficiency and task coordination for you and your team. Ultimately, you’ll end up making much better use of your time, delivering quality results for your clients, while keeping your team focused and productive.

Diverse Task Features for Optimal Project Management

ActiveCollab is more than a project management tool, although we do offer some brilliant features you can use to manage any kind of project.

Suitable for different project management methodologies, such as Kanban or Waterfall, you can visualize your projects the way that works best for you.

Organize tasks and task lists, so you and your team can easily find your way around, and work more efficiently:

• Create tasks with start and end dates, use custom labels for better organization, add an assignee and subscribers,

• Upload files, add time estimates, track time and expenses, mark tasks as billable,

• Create subtasks with due dates and assignees,

• Create task dependencies,

• Use the Comment section for updates and discussions,

• Turn comments into tasks or append them to the existing task,

• View the history of changes to keep track of everything,

• Batch edit multiple tasks,

• Use drag and drop to move or prolong the duration of tasks,

• Keep project notes, files, and discussions stored safely in a single place,

• Monitor expenses, people, and activity for the best results,

AND MORE. So much more.

Each team member can access their own My Work section, so they’re always up to date with their to-dos. There’s also Activity for people to see what others are doing at the very moment, which helps reinforce team spirit and a sense of common purpose.

Since everything is pretty customizable and flexible, you’ll be able to organize your ActiveCollab workspace the way you want.

Getting Started with ActiveCollab 8

Getting started with ActiveCollab 8 is easy. Discover how ActiveCollab can help you and your team shine immediately by signing up for a free trial—no credit card required!

If you prefer, you can book a demo first, so our experts can give you a more personalized overview of ActiveCollab features so you can see what it can do for your business.

Our Customer Success team is always there to walk you through and help you set up your workspace.

Bottom Line

ActiveCollab 8 marks a turning point in our 18-year-long history. We’re driven by our users, which means we’ll keep upgrading our software to offer you a seamless experience and excellent tools to help you run and scale your business.

You can rely on us—there won’t be sudden crashes or major loading issues due to too much unnecessary stuff. We strive to keep things simple, so you don’t have to spend hours learning how to navigate around your workspace, but focus on the important things instead.

However! 🙂 Just because we’re simple, it doesn’t mean we’re not powerful. ActiveCollab 8 proves that.