Are you looking for project management software for interior designers, or business management software for designers? Or perhaps you’re an interior designer trying to get work done and manage your projects, but don’t know where to start. Then this is the post for you! I’ve rounded up a few of my favorite project and business management software solutions. These all have great interior design templates which mean less time creating reports in your design software, and more time designing.
Business management software can help you manage your business, so it’s important to find the right software for you. We have researched and reviewed some of the best project management software for designers and interior designers to help you choose the right solution.
Toggl Plan
If your creative agency needs a business management software that’s easy to use, visually appealing, and provides real-time visibility into key business processes, you can’t do better than Toggl Plan
A firm favorite among creative teams at Disney, Spotify, and Buzzfeed, Toggl Plan is a web-based project and business management tool that has everything your agency needs to run more smoothly. Top-rated features include:
- A zoom feature that delivers both a short and long-term view of a project and business plans, so you have a better grasp of what direction the agency is taking.
- The ability to create attractive Gantt charts and share them with the entire team. Timelines, milestones, and tasks can all be color-coded for maximum visual appeal.
- A capacity planning tool that lets you manage your team more effectively. You can see what everyone is working on and provided any overburdened members with extra assistance.
Instead of switching from one tool to another, you can manage projects, tasks, clients, invoicing, and accounts in one software. (Even if you use other business management tools, Toggl Plan integrates with popular solutions like Slack, Asana, and Trello.) You will spend less time on administrative tasks and be able to focus more on producing beautiful and stellar work for your clients.
Clientjoy
Getting a new lead all the way through your sales pipeline usually means switching between different tools. You’ve got one platform for proposals, another for invoices, and a couple more to handle new leads and client info. That’s where Clientjoy comes in. Clientjoy is a Sales CRM & Growth engine for agency professions and freelancers.
Clientjoy is a platform that combines leads, proposals, contracts, invoicing, and payments for a streamlined client lifecycle.
Top features:
- All your leads, proposals, clients, invoices, and payments stay in one place
- View your sales pipeline in Kanban and List view
- Client portal so that you can communicate with your clients right from Clientjoy
- One single place for tracking your salesperson, item, proposal, and client performance.
Clientjoy is helping over 4000+ Agencies across 90+ countries manage their leads, proposals, clients, invoices, and payments.
Clientjoy has a free plan with which you can manage up to 3 clients. With The Pro plan, which costs $19 per month, you can manage unlimited clients.
InVision
Created for designers by designers, this digital product design platform has been widely praised for the quality of its user experience. InVision is a prototyping software that allows your web design team to quickly and easily create interactive mockups and share them with the team and clients. You can discuss the mockups with the artists and the client inside the app itself by leaving comments that connect to the point on the screen being discussed.
Other features include:
- Use the app to send the client a link to an interactive prototype that they can test.
- The comments and notes feature creates a real-time to-do list. You can indicate a point on the screen that needs to be reviewed and attach a comment, resulting in both a to-do list and a revision history.
- The Live Share allows the team to collaborate in real-time using a browser-based screen share. Each participant receives their own mouse, so everyone can easily point, sketch, and chat right inside the Live Share interface.
As anyone who works at a creative agency knows, presentation is everything. InVision is one piece of business management software that agencies specializing in web design simply must have.
Asana
Asana offers an easy way for teams to track their work, so everyone knows who’s doing what, by when. With tasks, projects, conversations and dashboards, Asana keeps your work organised and teammates accountable so you can move work forward faster. You can also keep track of your work wherever you are, with mobile apps for both iOS and Android. Asana is free to use for small teams, while paid plans allow you more members and access to features like custom fields, task dependencies, and advanced search.
WP Project Manager
Do you like to work with WordPress? Then WP Project Manager can be your best fit. It’s a simple yet powerful open-source project management software where your teammates will experience a joyful ride.
As we are talking about designers, they have to focus on the deadline, currently processed tasks, complete tasks, and creating new projects with the whole crew. Apart from that, time management for creatives is one of the important criteria, and WP Project Manager can do that without any issues.
Key Features
- Add unlimited To-do lists with a little description.
- Assign tasks to the teammates with a due date.
- Discuss projects with all the co-workers.
- Users get email notifications about assigned, upcoming, or outdated tasks.
- Users can manage projects from the frontend without going to the backend interface.
- Kanban Board facilities in WordPress.
- Track time with start, stop and pause buttons.
- WooCommerce, Slack, Github integrated.
Who Should Use It?
You can consider it as one of the best graphic design project management tools without any hesitation. WP Project Manager is specially built for the people who want to save their time from managing the organization and use that in more productive aspects. Like- Web Designers, Graphic Designers, Client Manager, Freelancers, and more. So, just run after your new thoughts & dreams and let this project manager help you.
actiTIME
When choosing business management software for designers, actiTIME time tracking software is scalable for any size business. It can help you work in tandem with and monitor other designers you may collaborate with on different projects.
If you’re not ready to commit, consider making use of a free version for teams of 3 or fewer users or a 30-day free trial for the larger versions.
actiTIME is very robust, integrated well into your business process, and most important, helps you focus on your business instead of monkeying around with technology. actiTIME has reduced our payroll processing from 4–6 hours per week to 45 minutes per week.
Function Point
If you’re looking for software specifically designed for creative agencies that want to streamline their processes, Function Point may be the right fit. With this option you’ll be able to do many different things.
Manage all your projects, forecast necessary resources, track worked time, create estimated invoices, and more with this choice. You’ll also be able to improve your productivity, boost income, and better understand your business data.
UpStream
We will now talk about one of the great project management software examples where the designers can get assistance with a minimalistic budget. Inside your WordPress site, you can use this project manager and the fun part is UpStream core is free.
They also encourage the users to try their demo version before making the final decision. Thus we are marking it as the best project management software for freelancers and SME business owners. Don’t worry as a web designer you will get a lot of extensions to maximize your productivity.
Key Features
- Clients can track the progress with the frontend project view.
- Teammates can watch their assigned tasks.
- Demo option before making the order.
- 100% localized and ready to translation any other languages.
- fully integrated with WordPress.
- Time and Budget Tracking Extension.
Who Should Use It?
UpStream is best at managing multiple projects and tasks with a bunch of users. Thus, the marketing and design team highly recommend this plugin. Moreover, the set-up in the back-end will blow your mind away. UpStream try to reach their plugin at a very reasonable price. And, that’s why it is suitable project management for graphic designers who don’t want to spend huge money but still want to manage their tasks properly.
SP Project and Document Manager
If you are struggling while sharing essential files with your clients or vendors then SP Project and Document Management system can help you out. As a WordPress user, you will love to use this for simple and manageable features.
SmartyPants are always available to support you whether you are a premium or free user. You can even call them on Skype! We think it is a perfect source of time tracking for graphic designers. So, the web designers who are working remotely will prefer it for regular usage.
Key Features
- Localization support for people with multiple languages.
- SSL support.
- Each user can have a personal file repository.
- WooCommerce and Amazon s3 integrated.
- The users are allowed to create projects and folders.
- Can download all documents or files of a project in a single zip file.
- Create multiple upload locations.
Who Should Use It?
Web developers, graphic designers, photographers, or architects need to share information with multiple users. With SP Project and Document Manager, they can easily distribute various files with just a click. Sales Managers, Brokers, and Real Estate professionals can get a lot of help as well.
Trello
Fans of Trello use it for nearly all of their personal and professional planning and management needs. It’s great for creative agencies because it’s a highly visual tool that simplifies the most complex tasks and projects. It also makes collaboration easy and actually fun!
Here are some of Trello’s most powerful business management tools:
- The presentation system of boards and cards that flow naturally from left to right allows an easy overview of anything from your personal work agenda to the tasks of a complex project. If you’ve ever used Pinterest, you’ll see a strong visual resemblance.
- You can upload attachments of up to 250 MBs in size, which is ideal for sharing graphics concepts, PDF mockups of publication pages, and more.
- The labeling cards allow for better organization and visual appeal. You can give each card a custom name and even color. Board backgrounds are also customizable.
Project managers in particular love Trello because they can easily map out their campaigns, set tasks and deadlines, and assign workloads to their team. Once everything is set up, they can get a general overview of their projects each time they log into the dashboard and make informed decisions on future actions.
Conclusion:
If you’re just getting started as a designer, you need to focus on the big picture of your career. Learn what business software to use as a designer, and how it can help you with your design management!