Welcome to beginner's guide for project managers or team leaders who create projects, budgets and tasks, track their time and manage projects expenses in Allfred.
Below you can find basic steps with key functionalities and their purpose, helping you navigate and understand how each step contributes to the efficient management of your agency's projects.
Before you start:
Make sure you filled out the positions and hourly rates in Proposals - Hourly rates and commissions section. Positions marked as default will be automatically used while creating new budgets. If you don't do it now, do not worry; you can create new rate cards at any time. But remember, creating new budgets without existing rate cards will require adding the positions manually.
Note: Rate cards can be created or edit only by roles Team Leader, Managing director, CFO or Admin. In case you need to change roles permissions, please contact [email protected]
Step 1: Create a project
Projects in Allfred are the fundamental building blocks where you structure and track your work. In project detail you can effortlessly navigate through budgeted work and expenses, monitor the progress and status of individual tasks, track spent hours, and keep an eye on invoicing.
You can create a new Project from a prepared and approved budget proposal or start from scratch.
In Allfred, you can create two types of projects:
Fixed-price: can include monthly retainers, when clients pay fixed amount each month, or projects with define scope
Time and materials: when you don't any budget for the project and the agency charges clients based on the actual time and expenses spent on the project
Additionally, you have the option to designate a project as "Non-billable". This is appropriate in two scenarios:
when creating projects for nonprofit organizations that are done for free and you dont expect any invocing
when creating Internal project that refers to work on internal development or tracking overhead costs such as rent, office supplies, salaries etc.
Once the project is created, you'll find the entered dates, contact persons, project managers, and any notes you've added displayed in the project overview. If there are any discrepancies, simply make corrections effortlessly using the Edit Details button.
Although the created project initially lacks data (in case it wasn't created from approved budget proposal), Allfred provides flexibility without any restrictions. From this point onward, you can dive right into working on the project, creating tasks, tracking time, and efficiently planning your team's schedule. Simply use the pre-created not-budgeted item, under which you can create the necessary tasks.
Step 2: Set up rate cards or position sets
Most clients have agreed-upon hourly rates for each position, which can be set either in Proposal section or in Brand details in Position sets subsection. You can create multiple position sets and activate the ones you want to use as defaults when creating budgets for particular brand. In addition to client rates, you can also set commissions for external production and media here.
Step 3: Prepare a budget
Allfred will alert you if no budget is assigned to the project. Assigning a budget (in case of fixed-price projects) is crucial for effectively monitoring hours, expenses, invoicing, and costs incurred. You can easily create a budget either through the Budgets subsection in Project detail or directly via the warning button.
In the Budgets subsection, you can see all versions of the budget, with the information about it’s approval status. The assignment status is showing the current budget version that is synchronised to the project. After assigning the budget, the not-budgeted budget item will be labeled as "deleted" if there are no tracked hours.
Click here to find out how to transfer reported hours from a not-budgeted budget item to another Task or Project.
Proposals
In creative agencies, it's common for clients to ask for cost estimates for projects still awaiting approval. For these instances, we suggest you use Proposals section. Here, you'll find all unassigned budgets, representing potential projects that are yet to be confirmed. This section is also where pre-made budget templates are stored, ready for you to adapt to suit the specific needs of your client's proposed project.
Step 4: Start working with Tasks
In Allfred, task is necessary for tracking the time spent on your projects. Without creating a task, you won't be able to accurately track your team's working hours.
In the Tasks section, you can find a list of all tasks. You can switch between "My tasks" or "All tasks" view and filter them by client or brand, team, status, priority, assigned people or positions, creator of the task, or task deadline.
You can sort tasks by their status, task ID, name, Project, budget item or deadline. Done tasks are hidden by default, but you can choose to display them by using the "Show Done tasks" option.
Step 5: Plan your and teams capacities
To execute and deliver individual tasks, you can plan your and teams capabilities in the Planning section.
Planning section is the initial destination for creatives, copywriters, social media managers, or other team members upon logging into Allfred. They can find here all planned assignments, deadlines, and tasks, whether originating from project managers, traffic managers, or the creatives themselves.
Planning gives you an overview how busy individual users are, what they're working on, whether they have capacity for other tasks, or whether they need to be rescheduled.
Step 6: Track your time
We know Tracking time is a critical part of agency work, and everyone has their own preferred method for doing it. That's why Allfred offers 5 different and easy ways to track your time - just with one click! No need to fill out task details unnecessarily. Allfred does it for you.
Step 7: Manage your project cost
Assigning external costs and preparing invoicing documents are vital steps in ensuring accurate project performance evaluation.
Step 8: Finishing the project
Finishing the project after meeting some criteria provides you with important financial data at a glance to evaluate project success and overall performance.