Great tool for finances, budget and employee hours tracking!
March 27, 2017

Great tool for finances, budget and employee hours tracking!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
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?
FunctionFox is especially well suited for really small businesses where there are NOT a lot of people to track, and manage. It really requires people to communicate with each other in order to track projects and communicate all other aspects, but serves as a useful tool to track actual costs over the lifecycle of the project.

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.
There are better tools out there to track multiple aspects of a business. We had issues with using multiple programs and keeping projects consistent between those programs, it became confusing and there was a lot of room for error across the board. We have since transitioned to a new program that tracks all elements of a project, from tasks, creative direction to proofing, budget, estimates, hours etc.

I would highly recommend FunctionFox for a smaller company (Less than 10 people) in order to monitor hours and bill to actuals.

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 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

Unsure on implementation of FunctionFox - was before my time at the company. Everyone at the company had a good understanding of the product and how to use it by the time I joined. My understanding is we implemented ourselves with a few training sessions for the creative team and adding hours as well as training for the account team to add projects.
Not sure - Not sure on this aspect. I joined the company after us implementing.

FunctionFox Support

I haven't used FunctionFox for a lot of support requests. On the times that i've been having issues I've had the issue resolved within a day, most questions I have had i've been able to source answers online or from a colleague. From what I have experienced the support team seems great.

ProsCons
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

It's a good tool for tracking hours and overall budget. It does not give you insight into why there are those hours, or what part of the project has over burned. The tool is also tough to export reports and find the correct information throughout. Not only this, but I also have a hard time changing project details - there's no real easy way to and there's a larger room for error.
ProsCons
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.