We are a full-service advertising agency that focuses on digital, branding, PR, and event marketing, and we are looking for (ideally) a full-service solution that combines our project management, HR issues, and purchasing and accounting. We are currently unsure whether it would make more sense to choose one software for all our areas of application (see above) or to use several individual tools and link them together. However, we want to avoid incurring unnecessary costs or causing additional work by creating projects twice.
Our requirements for the software per work area are as follows (priority - high, medium):
Team Strategy
- Create tasks + subtasks with deadlines, assign responsibilities - high
- iCal integration - high
- Attach files to tasks - high
- Chat function - high
- Desktop, tablet, and mobile display - medium
- Personal dashboard with current tasks - high
Team Account
- Easy integration of freelancers, service providers, customers, and other third parties into project work (via email invitation) - medium
- Easy integration of participating colleagues into project work (within the tool) - high
- Project documentation, bundling of individual projects within a campaign, uploading and versioning of files, file storage within the project and not in server folders - high
- Project-related internal communication digitally and visually controllable - high
- Time tracking in specific tasks within a project – what was calculated, how much time was used? – medium
- Easy time tracking/project evaluation at the click of a mouse; simple efficiency analyses - high
- either integration or synchronization of appointments and to-dos with iCal - high
- personal dashboard with an overview of all created tasks, tasks to be completed, upcoming appointments and to-dos, etc. - high
- one dashboard per project with facts & figures (template) and the option to involve colleagues in to-dos - high
Team HR
- Recording and managing master data - high
- Recording and managing absences - high
- Maintaining and updating payroll - high
- Recording and tracking performance - high
- Recruiting (complete applicant management including feedback function, digital personnel file, onboarding and offboarding, etc.) - high
Team Finance
- Converting cost estimates into invoices - high
- Receipt and dispatch of invoices, overview of paid, unpaid, and in progress - high
- Filtering/marking invoices - high
- Purchasing - Forwarding invoices to customers, working with external service providers (currently runs via DATEV) - high
- Recording and conversion of time tracking data from operational business per project and employee - high
General
- Local solution (on premises)
- Network-compatible
- Migration or data transfer (e.g., master data, project data) from legacy systems (existing agency software, financial accounting)
We have a total of 40 employees who would mainly need to work with the new agency software. Depending on the software recommendation and payment model, we could also involve some other in-house employees, bringing the total to around 60 employees. We mainly work with standard Mac OS, but the finance team uses MS Windows.