ActiveCollab a boon for T&M projects

Overall Satisfaction with ActiveCollab

For two teams Active Collab is being used in my organization as project management tool after our customer decided to move to agile scrum framework from waterfall. Earlier these teams were using HP ALM.

Since project moved from fixed capacity to T&M, Active Collab was very helpful since its billing & invoice features allows you generate the invoices easily.

Here cost can be easily assigned to each team member, Team members can start the timer after they start their work, then allows you to export the time records of team members making it easy to complete the billing.

It tells us precisely how much budget you've spent, who is working on what with how much capacity available and how deadlines and responsibilities overlap across multiple projects.

Thus AC served as excellent tool providing a great snapshot of team work at any given point to customer.

  • Its billing & invoice feature worked pretty well for T&M teams. ActiveCollab version 5, the current version, allows you to directly track time to tasks using the Timer app and later create invoices based on those time entries. Their statuses will change through phases, as you are pending payment, or after they are set as paid.
  • Here cost can be easily assigned to each team member, Team members can start the timer after they start their work, then allows you to export the time records of team members making it easy to complete the billing.
  • File sharing feature is very useful for distributed teams as we can we can easily share files, screenshots.
  • Also ActiveCollab ability to connect to Google docs, attach images and link to web pages make it unique from other project management tools.
  • AC easily allows you to track your daily tasks & serves reminder if miss on the targets defined by giving daily / weekly reminders regarding tasks and any that have gone over due dates.
  • ActiveCollab is quite easy to use. With just a few clicks, you can create a new project.
  • The dashboard and options are easy to see and it is well laid out.
  • Here user have an opportunity to select the number of emails they receive from ActiveCollab and for some email providers, such as Gmail grouping is enabled. So rather than getting multiple mails, it send you a summary of all the daily notifications in one mail.
  • It allows users to upload several files at once on task comments, and if you are set with the owner role, or have the member role but are a project leader, you have a Batch Edit option available on project level. This allows you to edit multiple tasks at once and change all the details on them, such as assignee, due dates, labels, importance, and more.
  • It does not provide support to scaled agile frameworks like SAfe which is there for Rally & AgileCraft.
  • For T& M teams, it is very good tools not only to manage teams but billing & invoicing.
  • we are able to generate invoices easily which earlier was a lot of headache & took lot of effort & time to do.
  • Whenever we encounter any issue in using any feature of AC, we get lot of support from their support desk.
  • Their customer service has been very responsive and helpful throughout.
  • Task management is USP of AC. It supports active tracking of our daily tasks & serves reminder if we miss on the targets defined, this helping us keeping on track & meeting the customer SLA's.
Since we moved from fixed capacity project to T&M we need some tool who support our billing & invoicing.
HP ALM did not provide good support for invoicing so we moved out from HP ALM to ActiveCollab.
The features like Timer, reminders are not available in other project management tools like JIRA, Rally & ALM making AC the first choice since we have strict SLA's & AC helps in meeting that.
Scenarios where ActiveCollab works well
1) ActiveCollab works well for small teams specifically T&M teams.Its invoicing feature is unique & can make your life easy.
2) It is very easy to use & posses good range of filters like on the task list, we can drag/drop tasks, Filter by assignee's,
tasks lists, due dates, or completed tasks.
3) It has some simple but awesome features like when you're in
the middle of writing something i.e a comment on story and get interrupted,
it retains what you wrote.
4) It allows you to tag team members in threads of comments to grab their attention, its really needed when teams are distributed. Thus helping team members to collaborate easily & stay on same page.
5) It integrates pretty well with other web apps like quickbooks , Slack, Trello, HubSpot, Zapier etc

Scenarios where ActiveCollab did not work well
1) Tasks can not have multiple assignee's here so if two members are working on same task it did not allow you to reflect that.
2) Sorting capability is not their under invoicing
3) It did not work well for larger teams
4) Search option is not very detailed & you may end up wasting lot of time searching one particular bug or issue.












ActiveCollab Feature Ratings

Task Management
9
Resource Management
9
Scheduling
6
Team Collaboration
6
Support for Agile Methodology
6
Document Management
9
Email integration
8
Mobile Access
8
Timesheet Tracking
9
Change request and Case Management
7
Budget and Expense Management
8
Quotes/estimates
7
Invoicing
9
Project & financial reporting
7