Recommended pairings with Hubspot in Agency / Professional Services Automation setting

[AndrewCassidy]

Hello everybody, 

I'm currently researching solutions to work downstream of Hubspot in an agency setting to take care of Project (time / task) Management, Resource Management, Collaboration and even Accounting (Professional Services Automation). 

Do any of my Agency peers have experience of Mavenlink in conjunction with Hubspot or have other suggestions / best practices (such as Basecamp, Monday, Trello, or Trello + something, etc). 

Mavenlink has a good reputation in the PSA space but my initial impression is that it's sweetspot is with relatively well-structured predictible / "waterfall" type processes (and less with "agile" project management involving third-party resources.

Any experience shared would be most appreciated, 

Andrew

[jennysowyrda]

HI @AndrewCassidy,

There was a conversation around productivity tools in general that may have some useful insight over here.

I want to pull in some partners as well to get their input. @Tanya, @Kapil_Arora, @ElyseMeyer do you have any thoughts for @AndrewCassidy?

Thanks,
Jenny

[Tanya]

Hi Andrew,

We've used Mavenlink for these and it works quite well for tracking time, resource allocation and breaking down the revenue vs costs. It does have some limitations when it comes to recurring tasks and (when we used it) it didn't have invoicing capability involved, which was a gap for us. 

About a year ago we moved off Mavenlink over to Accelo because it gives us the option to build a project estimate within it, get client sign-off, auto-convert that into a project, track time against it, and then generate invoices based on the project that was signed off on or on the time tracked to the client/project. In theory, it's a full end-to-end service opps tool. In practice, we only use bits and pieces of it and don't fully leverage the entire functionalities that it offers. It's also $$$$. 

Aside from the end-to-end functionality, it also cut out some other tools that we were using so we have overall costs savings and fewer communications issues. 

[petercaputa]

Hey Andrew, 

We recently collected project management/time tracking suggestions from 32 agencies, many of them HubSpot partners. 

The most common tool chosen is Teamwork. Also, many use Harvest as a compliment for time tracking. 

Here's our data and their suggestions: 
https://databox.com/agency-project-management-tools-processes

[darynsmith]

Hey @AndrewCassidy

We're also on Accelo - being using for about a year and it's doing most of what you are asking.

[Kapil_Arora]

@AndrewCassidy we use Basecamp and have also worked with Mavenlink earlier. 

Regards,

Kapil