Business Management Software

We use WFM (WorkFlowMax) integrated with Xero; Gmail, Basecamp and Dropbox.
Less so; Google, EverNote & Whatsapp (internal IM only).

How do you find WFM? We looked at it ages ago but it seemed a little all over the place - though it is written by the Xero dev team so the integration will be good!

Hi Ed,
At Agile Collective we use Harvest for time tracking, Taiga for project management and Rocket chat for internal comms. The latter two are open source projects so can be self-hosted. We were going to develop our own time tracker but for a few reasons have decided to go with Harvest which is working really well for us. We don't have any direct integration between Harvest and Kashflow, our accounting software, but we don't see that as too uch of an issue for us. We also use Google apps for email, calendar and document management.
What we are looking to solve is our resource management process as we are currently using a spreadsheet. However, it's as much to do with process as it is with the technology we're using.
Hope this helps,
Aaron

Hi Ed!

I hope you're well.

I think Aaron covered most of it, but at Agile Collective we also use a self hosted Gitlab for code management, and a self hosted Open Atrium for support client issue tracking. We have basic integration with Harvest to track time on support tickets from within the issue, which is useful. We do see some limitations with Harvest, but until we have time to write roll our own the pros outweigh the cons.

I wonder if there would be any appetite for collaboration on an open source time tracking system that met all our needs and integrated with all the things?

Cheers,

Finn

Hi all

Great topic @edrussell

Our main internal tool is Plan.io (https://plan.io/) - a hosted version of Redmine, which provides us with issue/time tracking, wikis, repositories and IRC. We also work a lot via Google docs and Etherpads (via https://titanpad.com/) for document collaboration.

For accounting, we've recently switched from FreeAgent to Xero. Having some teething problems with expenses management...

We have a daily standup via Google hangouts (we have an App account) , having tried others such as appear.in

We tried to integrate Loomio, but found we were replicating discussions taking place in plan.io. As a team, we do not use Slack, Trello and - importantly - email to communicate with each other, although we have some clients who do.

Thanks
Steven

Hey Steven,

Thanks - I'd not seen plan.io before. I'll check that out :-)

Let me know if you need any help with Xero - we've been using it for a while now. Though we manage expenses centrally (so they get sent to a team who put them on rather than being self-uploaded).

Ed.

Hey everyone

We're spread across quite a few platforms at the moment but aiming to streamline a few within the coming months.

• Xero for accountancy (just moved from Freeagent, it was too small for the size of the business)
• Google Apps for calendar, email, Drive
• Loomio, not sure if we're using this to it's full potential
• Slack for internal comms/some comms with certain clients
• Toggl Pro for time tracking, we upgraded a few months ago from the basic plan. Implementation was a bit painful but it's going well now
• Copitch, this was created by Matt Parsons- still not quite finished but already looks great. His aim was to facilitate freelancer collaboration through shared responsibility by pooling skills/resources, identifying day rates vs budget and listing deliverables. We've just started to use it. Ideally we'll eventually have a button that connects Toggl to Copitch so that we can see how much time has been spent on each project alongside the rest of the info.
• Float for resourcing
• Wiki for our staff handbook

We're super keen to try to join stuff up.

Even if we all use quite different models it would be nice for new/younger co-ops to be able to take them off a shelf.

Let's arrange some systems workshops/demos/discussions for the event.

Thanks for starting this thread @edrussell this is a core topic and key area of potential collaboration and development I'd say.

I'm not a developer, but I get excited by plans/ visions like that outlined in this early document about Enspiral's plans for an Open App Ecosystem (see also related Loomio group here).

In a very similar vein check out this post on ideas for a Collaborative Technology Alliance.

I really think and hope that supporting and developing such interacting and integrated open source tools for "transparent, democratic, and decentralized organizing" (as Enspiral put it) is/ could/ should be one of the core focuses of this network.

A big part of our reason for organising Open 2017: Platform Cooperatives is to try to get the existing wider co-op movement in the UK to get behind such efforts. Help! :)

@edrussell @felixwave @aaronhirtenstein @finnlewis @stevenflower @kayleighwalsh @harryrobbins just as people who've so far participated in this thread I love to hear any thoughts you have on all this Open App Ecoystem stuff mentioned above? :)