Function Point

Pros

The company pages in Function Point provide us with all the information we need because we're able to customize them to our needs. We can include the client information, but we also have team information so one page tells everyone who is involved with that client's projects. The customizable dashboard also allows each person to view things that they feel are important to them.

Cons

I find Function Point to not be as "functional" as its name might suggest. It is often laggy when you click on links. Getting to pages that you want to be on takes many clicks instead of just one (for example, it seems strange to me that clicking on the name of a "schedule" within a company takes me to a jumbled list of tasks rather than the actual schedule page where I can see things laid out in order). There isn't a good calendar view that allows a person to drag and drop tasks (and since I manage our company's design calendar, it would be great if I could do this since it's basically like putting together a giant puzzle).

The customization seems to have stopped with the "dashboard" type of views of the main page and schedule pages. If you want to view, for instance, the time allotted to people within the company for a day, you might visit the Work Planning View, which overall is a great view (shows tasks assigned and a total number of hours allotted to each person). The downside is it always only shows everyone in the company, which isn't ever what I need. Being able to choose who I see in this view (and others like it) would improve the functionality a lot.

There are also too many different ways to view things. There are at least three different ways to see how many hours of work a person has scheduled for the day. There are a couple of different views for tasks within a certain project. It can be overwhelming.

Pros

The ease of timetracking against specific jobs, service lines and tasks; financial and project/task management tracking in one platform; estimate creation within the system that has all the information transferred automatically when making it a job; the BI reporting with bar graphs and pivot grids.

Cons

The lack of reviewing software; how difficult/how many extra steps it takes to move a task to a different assignee or different date; no seemless/single channel communication tab; no quick search functionality; it's not an easy system for account or project managers to keep tabs on mulitple projects/people at once.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Function Point

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Function Point

Pros

It's really great for projects. The structure for setting up estimates and Jobs and Tasks works great when you're focusing on individual projects.

And creating Tasks are straightforward, we love that you can pass tasks back-and-forth between team members.

We can pretty easily communicate new tasks and jobs/projects to people who don't work in the office. Between Job description, Tasks descriptions and comments on tasks, Notes and comments on notes, and the ability to upload files, there's a lot of power there. Nice to have a track record of things.

And when you're billing for an individual project, the billing function is great.

Cons

Billing for retainer clients is not simple or easy. Integrated billing was a big reason we went with Function Point, and it works great for individual projects, but I think the retainer function was added on as an after thought, and is very clunky. To the point that we're thinking about only using the FP billing feature for projects, and just billing Retainer clients straight out of QuickBooks.

Also, the Reports are fairly worthless. They are so complicated to interpret, and confusing to create. Most of the reports don't pull up in the browser, they are automatic downloads to an .XML file. And some of the files names are completely different from what they are called in Function Point. I once spent half a day trying to recreate a report I had made a few months ago, but could not find the report listed anywhere in the Report section. It took a support ticket for me to find out that even thought the file name that had downloaded with the report was called "Cost Recovery Rate Report By Client", the report I had to run was called "Billable Hours Recovered By Staff".

And the Jobs are pretty great, but it is annoying that you have to create and Estimate every time you create a new job. With Retainer clients, we don't always have to get an estimate approved before we start on a job, so it's just an annoying step. And it's another level of settings you have to go through to get things in the Job right.

Pros

I like Function Point for its absolute zero lagging time. Once clicked, it goes straight to the task or job that I want without showing me the loading time forever. It is quite straightforward, searching for task numbers is easy to do and it is efficient for keeping numerous tasks organized.

Cons

However, sometimes I need to sift through files to find tasks without a task number. I typically filter out tasks completed within the last week, but anything older requires more time to find. There may be a better way to navigate and search, but I haven’t found one yet.

Pros

Function point is an efficient project management software with time tracking feature. You can also create project plans, estimates, and invoices.

Cons

The interface is very basic and it can be difficult to navigate to different sections of the website. Adding details about a task or estimate can be a challenge considering the space is limited and you have to drag view again and again.

Pros

Funcionalities are exactly what a medium - sized marketing or advertising / PR needs

Cons

Ease of use is not always great. Would be great if some focus could be put in there

Pros

Depth of information and availability of data. The amount of information can be intimidating to a new user, but with experience, the ability to not simply keep track of projects, but to be able to monitor the health of your agency is essential. Function Point's robust reporting tools make that possible.

Cons

Lack of ability to customize and support workflow options that are outside of established understandings within the system. Additional client portal functionality for example.

Pros

The user interface is great and so easy that our creatives actually use it to track their time, while offering needed information for account services and project management AND it also back ends into Quickbooks to make AP and AR easier.

Cons

It would be great if the software had a more robust time tracking capability so that I can see more easily at a glance PTO, overtime, etc. That way, I won't have to invest in another software to track employee time.

Pros

The ease of which I can track time and be aware of deadlines and time estimates. Function point helps me stay ahead of my workload

Cons

You have to refresh your browser whenever a new task is added, requiring you to stop your time and copy and paste the time

Pros

Great for tracking time, jobs, and tasks within those jobs. Helps to keep me organized on a daily basis.

Cons

decimal format. sometimes I have to calculate the decimal time for tracking so many minutes. Not terrible, just a minor annoyance.

Pros

I love how easy this software is to create task lists! I can keep track of progress and add to it when needed.

Cons

There is nothing I dislike about function point

Pros

Pretty clean interface. Like that it's cloud-based so it's easy to do my job on the go. Customer support is good.

Cons

The resourcing view is really difficult to use. I'd love if it there was a clean way to see someone's availability utilizing the full project timeline and hours assigned. Currently it pulls in vacation hours into that view (which is not helpful) and does not extend long enough to forecast team availability. Improving this would be a huge help and make using FP much more useful. Currently it's being used as a budget and time tracking tool. The scheduler is not that useful - the view is a little convoluted so we don't use it much to schedule projects - we use Smartsheet for that for it's simplicity. If you could improve your schedule view and process that would also be useful.

Pros

The speed and interface. Ability to track time simply, pull reports in multiple ways.

Cons

The accountant integration was a bit of a challenge.

Pros

It's a great way for all parts of the business to be on the same page, from finance to accounts to creative. Everyone can see the status of a project or client in one place, even though sometimes that place is hard to find.

Cons

I wish it were a little more obvious as to what some of the features are. Our agency has had to define SME on FP and it's always that person who makes the call as to what parts of it we're using and what we're not. For that reason, I feel like that there are probably useful things available that we're not taking full advantage of.

Pros

The organisation and workflow process. Quoting & invoicing is now so simple.

Cons

We have a couple of clients that like to attribute multiple POs to the one job, i.e. multiple estimates to what is ultimately the one job. We've had to create projects for all of these but it then becomes confusing which job number we're referring to. It would be ideal if you could have multiple active estimates for the one job.

Pros

FP is a very versatile software program. From the ability to save templates of our most current jobs, to being able to pull reports to see which jobs are most profitable have been valuable to our business. THough it wasn't designed for a creative agency model, which means we also have to use other productivity software in conjunction with FP, it serves its function well.

Cons

It's not so much what I didn't like, it's what is not important to our business model. Things such as Tasks and Schedules aren't as easily accessible as something like Trello, and having the option to remove those tabs from the interface would be useful.

Pros

It's best feature is most probably the time tracking functionality. Every employee uses it to track their time daily, then reports will be created and send directly to clients. The real time tracking makes clients happy as they know where their money goes, also the employees have it all saved as input for later.
Also great reporting tool: the organisation knows where most time and energy is invested by its employees.

Cons

The one con we can think of is that although for an experienced user it becomes easy to maneuver, it does require training.

Pros

automation power of schedules, integrated timetracking and invoicing

Cons

FP tries to accommodate so many types of businesses I feel there is a lot of wasted features for me personally. Some aspects of system setup were very cumbersome, and certain features just don't make sense; Using taxes for US based businesses is a burden, unable to add a separate bill-to on invoices than the actual company name (many companies use alternate names for billing) makes integrating into QB a burden as there must be manual changes whenever this occurs (which is often), and numerous other odd items that don't make sense to me.

Pros

I've used FP for 10 years as we've grown from 1 to 12 employees. It's been a lifesaver for proposal writing, time sheet entry and monitoring. Great for consulting firms with a lot of project on the go.

Cons

A few of the reports that the system can generate need some work. Particularly the "Job Summary By Individual". It has a crazy predefined sort order that is not intuitive and doesn't follow Job # sequence! Why?! We use this report every month for invoicing prep. 10 years now and it drives us crazy. Please fix.

Pros

We like how FP serves as an aggregate for our production, sales and accounting divisions. The FP staff are very helpful and exceedingly pleasant (love those Canadians!).

Cons

Quickbooks integration could be improved. We spend a lot of time checking and fixing invoices before they can go out to our clients. Clients end up with more than one account due to the issue with ampersands. (And pretty much ALL our clients have an & in their company name!) It would be nice to be able to import a new list of prospective client contacts from an excel file, instead of having to type them all in individually.

Pros

To be able to track hours live with everyone at the office is very handy when monitoring projects.
Navigation is simple and intuitive.

Cons

Not really Cons but more suggestions :)

1. I wish there was more options with customizing the dashboard.
2. When I am logging in, entering password with CAP LOCK on, it does not tell me right away, like most other websites, so I end up entering it twice. I have to have the Cap Lock on quite often, so it could be really useful if it told me about it.
3. Also the Jobs tab under "View Jobs" - I wish more than 5 jobs can be shown on the drop down menu so it is quicker to reference different jobs.

Pros

I like the ability it saves previous jobs as far back as we have saved jobs. The ability to review previous jobs and provide good customer service to our clients by searching these items, makes my day to day job much easier!

Cons

The ability to customize to my specific day to day tasks. I would love to be able to make it more customer facing and "store front" like in the client portal and not as "warehouse" like.

Pros

easy to use, easy to manage projects and hours, keeps your projects organized

Cons

Sometimes it is a bit slow and it takes a minute to register an update, for example when I dismiss some of my notifications, it takes a bit to remove it from the list and it reloads to the homepage.

Pros

It's a perfect tool for team management, great for planning, the dashboard customization is great improvement and for someone who hate accounting and invoicing like I do, it's the perfect tool.

Cons

Very powerful but not easy to use, and makes us sometime lose time in finding the way to use one tool or modify an information.

Pros

We love it's ability to have over-arching projects that individual jobs are tied to. We have a lot of clients that give us a large PO to cover multiple things. We also like the ability of manage deferred payments / deposits in the system. I also like that the development team is listening to their users requests. There is a Submit and Idea button available, and users can view others ideas and give their input as well. Their Help Centre is fabulous, too, with videos, briefs, Crash Courses, Webinars, and a library of help topics.

Cons

I feel the reporting features could be improved. They do have wonderful reports for getting granular data, but they don't have the particular information I am looking for in a report. Users do, however, have the ability to download data from reports to spreadsheets so data can be arranged in a report of their choosing.

Pros

What I like most about Function Point is the ease of creating estimates and saving templates. It allows us to provide very in-depth estimates to clients and prospects, which we have received compliments on. Very rarely do I see estimates that are as detailed and clear as the ones that Function Point allows us to create with relative ease. Likewise, the simplicity of creating an Invoice from an existing Job also streamlines the process tremendously.

We also make extensive use of the Notes function to create easy-to-follow instructions for our artists to follow. The fact that these are then saved automatically with the Job and are easy to go back to and reference is very helpful. It makes organizing them and trying to keep track of them much less of a hassle.

Cons

One thing I don't like about the Function Point software is that, when a Job is "closed," any tasks that remain un-completed just sit on the Tasks/To Dos page on the homepage of FP. Sometimes we find that tasks we initially think will be required are not needed in the end. Once the Job is closed, I'd much prefer that the "left over" tasks automatically get marked in some way as to indicate that they were not completed, while still being removed from the Tasks/To Dos list.

My list is constantly cluttered by Tasks for Jobs that were finished weeks ago, but which I know nothing about because I was never required to actually complete that task. It ends up that someone has to manually close out every individual task that is not needed. Feels like a waste of time.

Pros

I like that I can access it anywhere and on whatever device I happen to be using. I rely on the weekly timesheet for most of my time entry stuff. The TAB through interface makes it really simple.

Cons

My biggest complaint is that when you make a mistake or key something that needs clarification, a dialog box requiring an action comes up nowhere near where you're currently working on the page. And you have to click the OK button to close it. It won't accept the return key or tab key.

Say you're looking up a job. You type in a few letters, hit TAB and a list comes up. That list is at the bottom of the page and you have to mouse over your selection and click it in order to move on. Even if you don't see the job you're looking for in the list, you still have to mouse over and click OK.

It's a small thing, but compared to all the other software I use each day, this is a pretty clunky issue for me.

Pros

Budgets, tasks, and schedules can all be connected and feed into each other, meaning less work for our team. Enter a timesheet entry and everyone knows the status of that task and how it has affected the overall budget immediately.

Cons

I think most things are specific to how we do business. For example, we'd like more customization of contacts and companies so we can track details more specifically. Right now, we're maintaining two CRMs -- FP and Salesforce. It would be amazing to combine them.

We'd like to be able to give clients more insight into their projects. We stopped pursuing the client portal because it looked outdated. Perhaps that's changed. But providing some way to share a real-time timeline / schedule with clients would be valuable to us.

We'd also value a re-do of the Resource Planner / Scheduler that allowed us to look at forecasted work, landed business that's not yet actionable (draft tasks) and landed, actionable work. This would give us greater insight into what business we can commit to.

Pros

I like that I have all our client's estimates and jobs at my fingertips when I need them, in a organized manner. I can see the overall health of a project at any given time - which helps us stay on budget. I also like being able to move employee's time around to different projects in an efficient manner - just a couple of simple clicks and the time is moved to the right place!

Cons

I wish there was a way to generate a master budget for all estimates related to a specific project. Our clients are always wanting a grand total for what a project, that has multiple jobs involved, is going to cost them. We end of up having to figure this separately and if would save time and resources if this type of feature was added.

Pros

That the layout is clear and easy to navigate. It makes it easy to assign tasks and collaborate with the rest of the team. Also love how easy it is to track time using the Weekly View timesheet window.

Cons

The financials page can be confusing when flipping between Estimates, Financials and Invoices (numbers repeat themselves, and line items are used a bit differently on each page).

Pros

For inputting time, it's pretty simple to keep track of jobs.

Cons

It's not very intuitive and there seems to be a pretty huge learning curve to really get to the crunchy stuff. I spend a lot of time just clicking around, trying to find things. This, however, has as much to do with my limited training as anything else.

Pros

The connect to email feature is fabulous, as is the Campaign view especially for viewing financials across several jobs at once. Just being cloud-based is a huge plus too. Very customizable which has made our team's immersion great, support is fantastic and very fast. We all love it!

Cons

Sometimes the organization is a little irritating, ie if I click into a job's Notes from the icon on the Summary page (as opposed to the Notes "tab") I'm now in an overall Notes space and no longer under the umbrella of the job I started from. Even with the breadcrumbs, I find I have to do a fair amount of backward navigating to access info I'd already navigated to. If I click into a task, to get back to the main task list I have to navigate back to the job, then back to the Tasks tab/list. I know we can use the browser's Back button but that doesn't feel like true navigation and sometimes needs a refresh to update which is just another added step. Just seems funny to me that sometimes while navigating within a job, you are taken outside of it even if you are still just viewing its contents. Overall this is minor and we've gotten used to it, and I'm sure there are reasons why things are the way they are, but if I could change it I probably would. Only another thing I'd say is that more text formatting options would be huge, being able to set a text to even just one other color (red?) or highlight portions of text would make tasking things out even better.

Pros

I like that that job/client/financial/task/timesheet information is all in one central location. There is a lot of crossover in information, and it is nice to have a centralized location.

Cons

I do not like how non-user friendly the project management portion of the system is. There is little visibility to the status of tasks in connection to a broader timeline of dependencies/team members/etc. I would like to be able to "watch" tasks, answer questions, tag other team members, approve them for the next stage in the process or change person assigned to it when it's complete to initiate a new task for someone else. I also think there are a lot of glitches, where pages refresh on their own. I have noticed this on timesheets and task creation.

Pros

This software has a great integration of project management, time management, budgets, suppliers and many other features that make it unique.
Constant improvements and features make the software quite competitive when compared to other industry standards, although it is not as common

Cons

Could use better visibility for task management in a more agile friendly manner such as sticky notes view.
Missing multiple currency integration for agencies working in multiple countries

Pros

Time tracking, Job Management from Estimate to Invoicing.

Cons

Lack of visual interest (i.e. would be great to look for like Trello cards /boards at a glance to see all project status at once) - also would be nice to have a thumbnail of the project (i.e. of the ad, brochure, etc.) next to the job name on all dashboards.

Pros

Handles everything in one system -- setting up clients, creating jobs, allocating time to projects and tracking due dates. It's also nice that it allows customization and can handle POs and invoices.

Cons

This isn't a great CMS and definitely doesn't include the features that a sales team desires. It also won't allow you to see the difference between hours budgeted and hours actually spent as you have to reconcile the "estimated" and "actual" hours spent.

Pros

Schedules

Cons

The smartphone app, wish it had more functionality.

Pros

Good time tracking tools, good customizable request and schedule templates that cut down on job entry when you do the same type of projects repeatedly.

Cons

It is built more for external agencies and has more bells and whistles than our internal agency needs. No easy way to exclude features so as to not show a more complex UI than necessary.

Pros

Once we got used to the system it is very easy to use, and to generate reports.

Cons

Would like a more detailed way of managing projects

Pros

The desktop version is easily understood with a clean interface. I like the option of the mobile application as well for on the go record keeping.

Cons

I love the idea of the mobile application; however, it freezes all the time and needs the bugs worked out. If you can fix these reoccurring issues I'll be a raving fan.

Pros

- It's fairly intuitive
- It does keep all information on a job together, in one place
- The customizable dashboards based on how you will use it in your role
- Timesheets are straight foward and easy to use (makes for easier tracking on a job)
- Dashboards on where a project is sitting financially are nice

Cons

- The amount of clicks it takes to get to certain areas (ie - hours assigned on a job or getting into an estimate when you don't recall the job number)
- Scheduling could be so much better! Incorporating a scheduling system similar to SmartSheet would be amazing
- Tasks could also improve. I'd like to see the ability to add sub-tasks or the ability to cc another person on tasks (think Trello)
- Google Doc integration would be AMAZING! While function point is a great place to store things, the lack of formatting and the the chance of losing all your work by going 'back' in a browser is limiting.

Pros

Flexible
Robust
Fairly easy to use
Consistent addition of new and/or improved features
Price

Cons

The learning curve and getting everything set up was a big undertaking, but we are glad we did it and have no regrets.

Cons

Their customer support team is really great and always willing to help you figure out how to accomplish your ideas. They also have a great suggestion board where users give ideas on how to make the product better. They have used a couple of mines already! It's a great community that works together to continuously improve and perfect the program.

Pros

There are a lot of features that could be disparate apps but all come together nicely in one program. We mostly use for estimating, time tracking, invoicing and reporting. We don't use the brief or schedule features currently but would like to look at them again to see if they might be good for our team now that we've bene using FP for a few years.

Cons

It took us a while to set up in a way that made sense for our teams/how we work and to put some best practices into place. When we first started using FP, the Brief and Schedule features were clunky/didn't work for how we work so we haven't been able to utilize them. I also feel like some workflows are clunky and I find myself going back and forth to different views to complete tasks, but make it work!

Pros

Easy to use
Work on multiple browsers / desktop and mobile.

Cons

Limits on file size
Improvements to the 'search' function when trying to find a job

Pros

Efficient time tracking system and project management tool, also really great for pulling reports and understanding workload

Cons

Anytime you're going from no structure to full structure, there's a bit of a learning curve. But since everything has been up and running, the team has had little complaints.

Pros

It has a lot of ability to customize. I love that you can change your homepage to display different components of the software to fit what you're looking for. Not only that but you can also customize the reports that you can pull. This makes it easy to evaluate projects after their completion and determine profitability. Overall the software is pretty user-friendly.

Cons

There are some pieces of the software that I don't understand why you can't change. There are certain boxes that we can't edit and don't necessarily need. Or I would love to be able to make some boxes mandatory before moving forward. I also wish there was an easier way to see the schedules that get built out. The schedules are great because they let you setup each step in a job. However, I'd love to be able to pull a report that tells me what phase of the schedule each job is in. For example is Step 1 and 2 are marked "Completed" then it would show me Step 3 as the next "In Progress". This would be a huge help in our agency for project management.