How Function Point Helps You Run Your Agency Remotely

By now you’ve probably forgotten what your office looks like. As far as your brain is concerned, you’ve always run your studio from the comfort of your home office. But for all the talk of adjusting to the ‘new normal’, many of the workflows and processes in place reflect the old way of life—where work happens in the office.

Running your agency remotely brought new challenges. It became difficult to get a snapshot of the studio’s health, impromptu meetings about projects became scheduled catch-ups, and you could no longer scan the office floor to get a sense of what was being worked on.

An all-in-one agency management software like Function Point reduces the stress and uncertainty that comes with a distributed workforce.

In this blog, you’ll learn how Function Point offers greater visibility into your business, allowing you to easily track employee workloads, how long projects take to finish, and whether key deadlines are met.
Furthermore, we will show some of our favourite ways to communicate, stay connected as a team, and keep morale high.

All-in-One Software Makes Business Visibility Easy

Disconnected from your staff, it’s not always obvious what’s being worked on. It’s no wonder that when FP conducted an industry report on productivity, we found that 87% of agencies use technology to help their teams work remotely.

There’s a certain peace of mind that comes with a one-click solution for your business’s internal operations. Siloed solutions mean multiple logins, multiple user interfaces, and multiple tabs open at once. Not only can a plethora of browser tabs negatively impact productivity and mood, the lack of consistency between softwares can cause oversights in data entry. Perhaps an employee fills out their timesheet but forgets to update their task list because it’s in a different window. The end result means unreliable data and a fog surrounds your internal operations.

Function Point is an all-in-one solution that manages your day-to-day work and productivity. We provide consistency and predictability—everyone’s working in the same system, and their time, tasks and budget information are all tied together.

You know your team is looking at the same information to make decisions for the client or for the company. And, perhaps most importantly of all, we reduce tab anxiety.

Workload Management Dashboards Helps Prevent Employee Burnout

One of the best ways to keep your staff engaged is to give people space to balance work and life. That doesn’t always mean a 50/50 split. Some weeks work will be busy, other weeks your personal life will require your attention. With schools closed for the summer, many employees are juggling work and family—children are (literally) pulling them away from the computer screen.

Even business owners can’t control life. What you can do, however, is pay attention to your employees’ workloads and act on that.

As a distributed team, you can’t always see the stress on someone’s face. Morning catch-ups and afternoon happy hours provide some insight into people’s well-being.

But to supplement these conversations, using the data available in Function Point provides a deeper insight into workloads and stress levels. Using our workload dashboards allows you to easily see who is being pushed to capacity and who may have room to take on some extra work. Using historical data you can see which of your employees are consistently being overloaded with work, a sign they may be burning out.

Furthermore, you can use the workload tool to view the horizon and see upcoming quiet periods. Using that data, you can encourage stressed and overworked employees to take some time off and come back to work energized and ready to go.

QuickBooks Integration Allows Easy Access to Cash Flow

During uncertain times, your finances are among the first things you want to secure. Knowing your expected incoming cash flow over the next 30-60-90 days will help subside any waves of anxiety concerning the overall health of your business.

Our integration with QuickBooks helps you easily keep track of invoices.

Importantly, the QuickBooks integration lets you check on unpaid invoices that are sliding into the 61-90 days unpaid category. When they enter that category, they risk becoming write-offs—something you want to avoid at all costs.
The integration also keeps communication open in real-time. Your project managers can easily tell clients which invoices are overdue without wasting resources on slow-paying customers.

Final Thoughts

With the right tools, running your agency from home can be the same as running it from the office. The key is to bring all your key tools under one roof.

Doing so provides peace of mind that all your information is being entered uniformly, providing visibility into your team’s workloads, your incoming cashflow, and the timeline of current projects.