Item: ClickUp
Rating: 10
Author: Maria Weaver

Overall Satisfaction with ClickUp

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ClickUp to manage all aspects of my bookkeeping, payroll and financial advisory business. We use ClickUp to manage social media, potential client meetings, onboarding of clients, ongoing monthly and quarterly bookkeeping work, and offboarding of clients. We also use ClickUp to manage and track all matters of operations, including tracking specific information on our clients, time spent per client account to manage profitability, and for myself management of all executive functions of the business. ClickUp is literally the backbone of everything we do!

Pros and Cons

Pros

ClickUp works well with allowing custom fields for us at various levels of the hierarchy. This allows us to truly customize for our needs
ClickUp allows us to build whiteboards as views - I love this as I'm able to whiteboard a process within the area (the folder or list) the actual work is being performed in.
We love the Gmail integration - it's a HUGE time saver! Everyday my VA will add emails into ClickUp that require action. We love that the integration pulls the email itself as well as all attachments into the task for follow up. This is one of the single biggest time savers in our business.

Cons

I would really like more options around time tracking - there is an area to mark whether the task is billable or not billable, but I would like to be able to have more options, for example I would like the ability to enter an hourly rate per ClickUp user, and also the ability to enter a flat rate fee for a user, for example I might pay a team member $100/mo to complete bookkeeping, but I need that to show as a cost against the total billable amount for that client.
I would like to be able to customize my Home view
we use the email feature in ClickUp (sending emails out of the ClickUp task), but we really need the option for the "to" field to save email addresses so we don't have to constantly pull frequently used email addresses from other task's custom fields to enter into the "to" field of an email

Return on Investment

I was able to cancel our subscriptions to Missive, Everhour, and Box.com due to the increased features ClickUp offers over our previous solution, Asana. I have at least $300 per month, and with a small team of 5, that's a big savings for me!
The ability to forward an email to a specific ClickUp list has been a game-changer. Applying the automation that immediately assigns someone and builds in a due date literally saves us 5-10 hours per week. The specific example: we get a large volume of bills from a client and these bills need to be entered and paid quickly. The ability to send each bill into ClickUp as a task, have those automatically assigned and handled by a team member vs. having to download, add a task, send a message through Slack (or worse, forward the email to the team member and hope it doesn't get lost) saves us all of these hours at a minimum!
I literally could not run my business at the size it is without ClickUp. We have 30+ clients we support, and Asana left us all frustrated and spending way too much time on medial, administrative tasks. Once we came back to ClickUp, we could breathe again, knowing we were now freed up to handle the important things, knowing ClickUp was with us in the background (as well as their hard-working team) supporting us and ensuring the automations, recurring tasks and other features were there, working as designed, to support our daily operations and growth.

Collaboration

We heavily lean on the @comment feature within ClickUp tasks. It is a daily task for each team member to review their notifications. We handle almost all of our communication in ClickUp! We still use Slack, however are in process with building out a chat feature within ClickUp so we can close out our Slack subscription.

All-in-One Productivity Platform

Yes, as I mentioned in an earlier question, once we returned to ClickUp from Asana, I was able to get rid of Box.com (returned to Google Drive), we also got rid of Everhour time tracking and Missive (email collaboration tool). I save at least $300 per month, which is a lot for a small team like mine.

Alternatives Considered

Asana, Toggl, Everhour, Missive, monday.com and Trello

None of the project management apps come close to ClickUp. Trello and Asana are very far behind ClickUp in features, and I really didn't find ClickUp hard to set up and use. Asana is so slow to put out features and so many things (like creating templates) are sort of "dumbed down" compared to ClickUp. For example, there is no ability to save that template to be used anywhere in the workspace. What a waste of time!

I am a big follower of Process Driven with Layla (YouTube channel) and her guides and advice helped me to easily implement. She's amazing and is a huge supporter of your product!

Key Insights

Do you think ClickUp delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with ClickUp's feature set?

Yes

Did ClickUp live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of ClickUp go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy ClickUp again?

Yes

Other Software Used

HoneyBook, Calendly, Keeper

Likelihood to Recommend

ClickUp is well suited for both tasks that have to be repeated on any interval as well as for one-time, project-based work. ClickUp is very well suited for one-to-one client services businesses like ours. We can keep all aspects of the client relationship within ClickUp and manage it well, all the way from tasks to onboard the client to managing their payment schedules and much more.

ClickUp is not well suited for creating and signing a client contract and including a recurring payment option. Though I can attach a copy of the signed contract into ClickUp, HoneyBook is the app best suited for us for these needs.

ClickUp Feature Ratings

Comments

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We are a bookkeeping firm and Raving Fans of ClickUp!