Quick Base Helped Our P.R. Agency Get the Billing Done Faster and Stay on Budget on Projects
May 05, 2020
Quick Base Helped Our P.R. Agency Get the Billing Done Faster and Stay on Budget on Projects
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Quick Base
I was a financial analyst at a mid-sized regional public relations agency. The new controller had used Quick Base at another company before and signed us up for it to use for project management. We were tracking hours using an old-time tracking service on the web but we couldn't get real-time information about billable or non-billable hours, which meant we didn't know if we were going over budget on projects or what our utilization was until long after the fact. The controller said that Quick Base could handle time tracking and project management, and he was right. We used it to record everyone's hours, project budgets and milestones, out of pocket expenses, measure utilization, process vacation requests, and more.
- Create reports on the fly to know what's happening in the company.
- Build dashboards for users in different roles so they can focus on their specific tasks.
- Mobile apps let people use Quick Base anywhere they have Internet access.
- Automatically send notifications based on criteria.
- Powerful form design.
- Needs a better way to track if notifications were actually sent.
- The user interface is a bit dated but they're improving it.
- Form design is powerful except for the styling options, doesn't look fully modern.
We built a completely custom project management app for our public relations agency. It perfectly modeled our complex billing rules-based and allowed us to get all our monthly billing out the door in a single day rather than a full week. We also built a human resources app from scratch that allowed employees to view/update their information, track their PTO, submit PTO requests, and route those requests through the approval process.
- Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
- Improving collaboration across one or more teams
- Solving a specific business challenge
- Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
In agency work, like public relations, utilization is important. We needed to see "how billable" each person was to make sure we were utilizing our resources to their best potential. Before Quick Base, we could only guess about utilization during the month and get real numbers more than a month after the fact. But with Quick Base we could see in real-time what everyone was working on and measure our utilization.
It also meant we stopped going over budget and working out of scope on a lot of projects. Before Quick Base, we were using something called TimeFox, but it couldn't handle our billing methodology. So we didn't really know how much was billable until after the month was over. A lot of times we learned that we were going over budget and doing work that we wouldn't be paid for. With Quick Base, we were able to monitor spend vs. budget in real-time and eliminate a lot of those out-of-scope and over-budget hours.
It also meant we stopped going over budget and working out of scope on a lot of projects. Before Quick Base, we were using something called TimeFox, but it couldn't handle our billing methodology. So we didn't really know how much was billable until after the month was over. A lot of times we learned that we were going over budget and doing work that we wouldn't be paid for. With Quick Base, we were able to monitor spend vs. budget in real-time and eliminate a lot of those out-of-scope and over-budget hours.
Once everyone in the agency started using Quick Base, people started asking us (the finance team that had brought Quick Base to the company) to add new features all the time. The project management app became much more powerful and useful for everyone based on these user requests. They thought of things that we would never have thought of. We had no problem implementing most of their requests.