Are you in the market for a system to track your work and bill your clients? Look no further. Paymo is one of the…
Are you in the market for a system to track your work and bill your clients? Look no further. Paymo is one of the best tracking systems that we’ve ever used. I’ve tried several systems, including Monday, BaseCamp, Asana, and many free options including Trello.
No system is perfect, but Paymo tops the cake. The best part of Paymo is that it’s free if you don’t intend to add employees. Which means Paymo would be free for freelancers that work by themselves. I currently have two accounts to Paymo. The contract that I work on, I’ve got employee access, and I have company owner access under my own agency with Paymo.
I also have an employee under subcontract that I’m working with. To make things simple, until I’m confident about adding employees into the system, I’m adding their hours to my own as necessary. I encourage each of you to check out this software. It’s worth the cost! (It’s free for one person, which is great for freelancers).
Once you log into the Paymo dashboard, you’re able to access a myriad of areas. Here you’ll find the sections within the system to manage Clients, Users, Projects, Time Tracking (with a timesheet and time reports) and Invoicing. It’s really our favorite task management, and project management tools in our toolbox!
Before we can add any projects to the system, we need to first add our clients. Within the client section, you’re able to add clients, track all of their bills and work spent on their projects. All timesheets that pertain to each client are visible, with a project management tab for each of the client’s projects that have taken place.
The invoicing feature is done with the Stripe or PayPal payment gateways, and it’s quite seamless. You can bill for a single time period, or the entire balance due. When you send the invoice for each client project, when you’re on the free plan, an email will be sent to the client that is branded as Paymo. This email will contain a Paymo link to a page where the client can execute the payment.
All projects are tied to a client, and managed on their own. Here in each project management section, you can manage files, time tracking, notes, and the client’s investment for the project.
The inner sidebar on this page has advanced filtering options. Each project will have a status such as Completed, Archived, Open, etc. and these can all be used within the filter.
From the main dashboard, you can also access the project details. When you click on the full details button, the below modal will open up that allows you to update the project as necessary.
Many details of the full project area can be updated here, even adding tracked time and notes, but there will still be times when its’ best to use the primary project area. When managing multiple projects, and in general for most cases, using the modal is perfectly acceptable.
There are times when you just want to not be distracted, and want to see the entire project covering the full page. This includes those administrative tasks for things like managing employees can be useful to use the main project area.
The most utilized feature for each project is part of the time tracking tools. Each project will show the tracked time for each task. There is also a clean time tracking tool that is displayed in a later section.
Aside from the standard project management capabilities, there are also great task management features built into Paymo. The best part is that all of your time tracking is done per task. That way you can view your task list, and know exactly how long it took on a specific task. Which will ultimately help you with your workflow and future quoting.
Like the other areas, you have the ability to use advanced filtering features, and manage the entire user profile from here. It’s important to note that this is specific to client management.
One downside to Paymo is that there isn’t much client communication happening on this platform. We can say from experience that it’s been improved quite significantly in the past year or so, but still there isn’t any client communication.
Paymo doesn’t have a public roadmap, but you can create a free account and view the “feature requests” (new features of the app that have been requested by users) in the Paymo Community.
When working with projects that are solely based on an hourly rate, this section of the software is amazing! When you are ready to send a bill to the client, it’s a couple of clicks and you are off to the races. You can even send a partial bill, and implement payment terms.
Once you send your invoice to the client, they will be able to make online payments. To our knowledge, there currently isn’t an option to send recurring invoices, but this is such a small downside that we just use our accounting software instead to send the recurring invoices.
Tracking time is the exact time of team member data that is needed to run a business. This timesheet data is really quite simple to capture. It’s also quite possibly that the best feature within Paymo is the time entry tool. You can access this from within the web application, from a browser extension, or even from a mobile application (mobile apps).
It’s important to note that when this article was written there were two Paymo mobile apps out there. One of which has been in “beta” for over a year. It’s hard to say when Paymo will retire one mobile app over the other, but it’s definitely coming one day. Be warned, because this could impact your workflow when it does happen.
Nonetheless, you can definitely view your task list, utilize the time tracking tool, and many other project management tools within the mobile apps.
Needless to say, but this feature alone is worth the cost. We personally recommend Paymo to other agencies in the digital space, and we would recommend them to any company that needs to track projects, time and payments and see how efficient their team members are working.
You can always create a free account with Paymo and test out the software’s task list and workflow for free. They even have a 15-day trial where you can play with their added features.
For freelancers and solopreneurs, the free account is perfect to create a customized workflow for one team member. For larger companies, you will likely need to pay for the software for each team member, but it’s definitely worth it!
Even developers have a new and shiny object to play with! There is a Public API for Paymo!
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