Small Business Owner's Insights about Insightly
December 15, 2016
Small Business Owner's Insights about Insightly
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Basic
Modules Used
- Insightly iOS / Android Mobile App
Overall Satisfaction with Insightly
We are a very small business, but all employees in all "departments" use Insightly. The main reason we started using Insightly was for contact management -- keeping tabs of all customer contact data and sharing between all employees. We also use it for project management and tasking. It helps us keep track of up to 20-30 projects that we produce simultaneously.
- Contact Management - Having a single database with all of the customer's information is very helpful. We use it in combination with PieSync to push the contact info to my Google account, therefore into my mobile phone.
- Task Management - Use it for assigning tasks to various employees and keeping tabs on their progress. I sometimes go days without seeing any of my employees face to face, so it's very useful to maintain progress on a project.
- Opportunities - We get inquiries every day from people that need to know availability and price immediately. Once we qualify a lead, we assign the project to the "Opportunities" category and that helps us keep track of proposals, emails, estimates, and other correspondence leading up to the contract.
- Projects - Once the opportunity becomes a contract, it's copied to a project within Insightly. From there, we assign tasks, manage deadlines, and keep track of correspondence.
- I am frustrated that various tasks aren't linked together. For us, we have a process, and the task due date represents more of a "goal" sometimes. When that due date can't be met (usually for reasons associated with our client, not with us) we have to move it back to a new completion date. Well, especially when we have an activity set, I have to manually change the date for each task -- sometimes a dozen tasks for more -- because they aren't linked together like typical project management software can do. This is time-consuming and frustrating.
- We have to pay PieSync to sync our contacts to our Google accounts. This seems like it should be a feature built in to Insightly, and not a third-party app and service that we have to pay for.
- Insightly puts everything into tasks. So if I want to track a phone call that I made to a client, I have to actually assign myself a task and mark it complete. I wish there was more of an "activity log" or something to quickly just push "phone call" or "meeting" to just keep track of those interactions rather than tasks.
- Centralized contact management
- Streamlined business processes
We have definitely achieved "centralized contact management" and that is very valuable to us. We have also gained some efficiency in business operations, because now we have in one place the ability to track projects. However, there is room for improvement in the project management side of things, and that's my only complaint about Insightly. For instance, if we have to reschedule a meeting, and other tasks were dependent on that meeting, we have to manually move the due date for each task one at a time. Not efficient. But other than that, Insightly is very helpful for managing huge workloads like we have on a day to day basis.