Features

A successful commercial project management is not only well-known and described process of communications and collaboration inside the developers team(s), it's also a less talked-about side of working with customers, PM-customer or sales-customer relations, integrated financial data, tools for keeping track of several projects, means to present your developers and customers all processes they are involved, at the same time protecting sensitive information regarding other projects or finances and many more.

What's the solution? Let's see how a hypothetical software development company could cope with all this by getting a domain at aheadOffice.com

User accounts and groups

Say we have accountancy, project managers, developers and customers. Let's create user groups for each of these users. We also wouldn't like developers to work directly with customers, and for this purpose we can make developers' group invisible for customers. This way customers will never see any person of developers' group anywhere in the system.

Import company contacts

Using tools for import contacts in CSV format we can easily fullfill the contacts section with company contacts. To protect contacts we can create contacts folders and set neccessary permissions.

Create contact categories

Contact categories do not only categorize contacts, but also have access control which allows to set view permissions on categories. This way you can protect sensitive contacts information.

Define Roles and Rates

Roles and rates, where you can set roles and their rates specifically for each project, and even add new roles for projects without making the roles global. E.g. if you lack a specialist in the staff and hire a season one for a specific project then this personnel can be added for this very project only. Or, if you'd like to satisfy your returning VIP client and make, say, designer's work cheaper for him or her - just make a simple rate correction and apply a lower designer rate for the client's project, while for all others the rate stays the same.

Create Projects

Each project has participants list, which creates the project group. Only people involved in the project (and the project group accordingly) and account managers can see and have access to the project and its tasks. The project groups can be used for variety of purposes, such as targeted announcements, or setting access permissions to all kinds of objects in aheadOffice.

Tasks

Tasks are processes inside a project. It can be assigned to someone participating in the project or event and be managed by this person or a project manager. Each task has hours that can be defined for any global role, and any role of the project.

Discuss all this

Each object like project, task or file has a discussion attached, so stay updated!

Receive email notifications

about everything important what happens in the domain.

Send manual or automatic invoices

Besides standard ways of invoices creation aheadOffice presents you an ability to automatically calculate and send invoices, basing on projects and tasks and amount of hours set for them. How it works? Quite simple. People who have access to a particular task can set amount of hours that have been contributed to the task. The amount can consist of different roles and rates (read about Roles and Rates above), e.g. you can set 2 hours for "Developer" role, 8 for "Designer". aheadOffice invoicing engine calculates the invoice and presents it in a clear and comfortable way, detailing tasks or projects included in the invoice.
Using you can set up the engine to generate and send invoices on projects automatically each month so you can even forget about this work - aheadOffice keeps track of the last invoice date and all rate and hours changes. So if you change your rate aheadOffice begins to use the new rate since the moment of update.
Besides, aheadOffice presents you with ability to add a discount, or add/subtract fixed amount from an invoice, select detalisation level of presentation (by project or by tasks) thus providing you with a powerful invoicing tool.

Detailed reports

Create reports for projects and tasks using flexible reporting tool. It will help you to see how much efforts have been dedicated to a project, see totals for several projects, estimate invoice amount or effectiveness of your teams.

Inform your teams

We can create announcements for user or project groups, or for the whole domain at once - easy and comfortable way to keep people updated.

Share calendars

Create public or private events in your calendar, share them, invite people, browse calendars of other memebers

All in all, enjoy the web 2.0 cutting-edge interface!

Still unsure? Don't hesitate to get a domain by filling in 4-fields simple form in the left column.
It's fully functional and FREE! No ads, no cheats.