5 of Our Favourite Online Tools for Entrepreneurs – Part 3

In parts one and two of this series, we unveiled two of favourite online tools for client relationship management, time tracking and invoicing. Once you’ve got the client under control and once they’ve agreed to go ahead with the project, it’s time to get to work.

Managing the project itself can prove to be a herculean task at times, especially if there’s frequent back and forth with the client throughout the duration of the project. That’s why today we’re talking about a great little tool that not only helps keep individual projects on track, but also allows you to see a snapshot of workday or workweek so you can effectively plan a course of action.

Project Management & Task Tracking: Asana

Before even getting into the abilities of Asana, perhaps the best thing to point out is that it is absolutely free. That is of course for teams under 15 people.

Sorry Jim, but you’ve gotta be out by five o’clock.

Asana is a task management system that saves your team time and resources that are spent simply doling out tasks to the who, what, where, when and why. Their motto of “Send tasks, not emails” rings true as you can set tasks and assign them to various team members. From there, conversations are blocked in by the project and task, making it easy to see what’s been completed and when. One cool feature is the ability to have Asana email a project leader when tasks are done so you can send it off to the client for review. When the client sends over files, they can be attached via anything from file attachments to Google Docs, Dropbox, etc.

For us, our favorite feature is how Asana can be integrated with the Harvest time tracker app that we talked about in part two of this series. This essentially allows us to set up one place to track tasks and time all at once.

Now, the ability to discuss tasks and attach documents doesn’t eliminate the need for good old fashioned email. Next time, we’ll show you some of what Google’s been working on besides just search engines and mobile phones.