Great tool for finances, budget and employee hours tracking!
March 27, 2017
Great tool for finances, budget and employee hours tracking!
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with FunctionFox
FunctionFox is a great platform to track all of our project's hours, record design hours and tracking a project lifecycle. It also provides an easy method for billing to have project numbers, names and a breakdown of hours billed throughout the weeks or months it's ongoing. I frequently pull functionfox reports from older projects to track time and actual cost to then scope new projects.
- Tracks hours/cost at the project, client or portfolio level.
- Allows you to pull reports for a number of financial components.
- Provided all employees have the training, comments are useful to understand what that time was for, especially in situations with over burning etc.
- The function of the site is not as user-friendly as others, it's sometimes hard to find certain projects and organize data in order to track effectively. I would often need to download/export reports.
- Sometimes a project would accidentally be created twice and hours billed to two separate projects for the same thing. Which made tracking and billing increasingly difficult.
- Little to no organization of projects for billing and finance purposes, which makes it hard when we conduct billing as there is not a clear way to know if a project is complete, ongoing, rejected etc.
- Track budget across projects, clients, companies and portfolios/purchase orders.
- Track designer hours and billable time for all members of the business.
- Conduct finances once a month for billable time and have actualized costs.
FunctionFox has limited use across other platforms I have used. It's really best for smaller companies with less projects and people to manage. There is really no way to track elements of the project (e.g. design changes), but serves as a really useful tool to monitor budget, hours and finances. I would also encourage businesses to use it to monitor employee hours, is any one over burning? Are designers working 60hrs a week? Do you need to hire additional resources?
Using FunctionFox
15 - The entire company used FunctionFox: account team, project management team, executives and creative team used to record hours, track budgets and pull financial information every month. We would use the program to track all elements of the business, including billable time, but also personal development, new business, sick time, vacation etc.
1 - A project manager is a good source of skills for managing FunctionFox, it's a little tricky to understand all of the components and pull the correct reports. The tool really acts as a database for a ton of information, so requires someone who can use excel to export that data, organize it and track information outside of the program.
- Finance - billing for clients, invoicing and tracking POs
- Budget - Tracking a project budget over the lifecycle.
- Tracking creative hours, ensure no one is overburning.
- Track/Organize comments as people add hours so we develop a better understanding of how long it takes to do something, we can then use the actual hours for future projects.
- Before using it in different ways, more training would need to be provided to the design team in order to track hours more efficiently. As well as have the account team add and organize projects correctly.
Evaluating FunctionFox and Competitors
- Price
- Prior Experience with the Product
The tool to my understanding is a lot cheaper than most others. Although simpler in its functionality it proves useful for tracking budgets and finances across a small company. I would encourage other smaller companies to use it.
In my experience, it's also been a tool that a lot of project managers have used in the past, so certainly helps with onboarding new hires.
In my experience, it's also been a tool that a lot of project managers have used in the past, so certainly helps with onboarding new hires.
In doing so again, I would probably re-evaluate FunctionFox. It is a useful tool, but doesn't have a wide variety of functionality. You really also need to buy additional programs in order to track other areas of business. This makes it tough and there's a much larger room for error between projects (e.g. naming conventions, numbers etc).
FunctionFox Implementation
Not sure - Not sure on this aspect. I joined the company after us implementing.
FunctionFox Support
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Good followup Knowledgeable team | None |
Projects weren't listing right in FunctionFox and I had to call a representative in order to fix the problem. This was during our monthly finance meeting, they had the issue resolved and sent a follow up email after to make sure everything was set. Really happy with the support received!
Using FunctionFox
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | Unnecessarily complex Difficult to use Not well integrated Lots to learn |
- Viewing all projects, e.g. hours spent etc
- Adding hours and time to projects (section to add comments for specifics)
- Exporting an excel/report for review
- Finding the correct tools, I found the menu to be overly complicated and confusing
- Tracking project numbers - When putting a project in, there's not a lot of information required, which can make it easy without knowing to accidentally replicate a project and have hours billed across both.
- Tracking open purchase orders - seeing all up to date projects, costs, has been really hard to do.