What software do you use to manage your small ad agency?

July 23, 2010 8:15 AM

If you work at a small ad agency (print / interactive), what software do you use to manage the place?

I'm doing some consulting work for a small interactive / print agency. They've got 5 folks now, and may scale up to 10 or 20 over the next few months. We've been looking at agency management software to take on the following tasks:

1) Job Cost Estimating
2) Time Tracking
3) General Accounting (or at least an export to quickbooks)
4) Lead Management

We can host it internally, or can host with an outside service.

I've checked out Workamajig, and am concerned about it's all-flash interface. Clients and Profits seems interesting, but seemed oriented towards a bigger team. Are there other products or services out there that make sense for an agency at this size?

posted by jenkinsEar to computers & internet (6 answers total)

My former agency used Clients & Profits. Staff of 7. When we first started with it it was really buggy but it was a new release version for them... once those bugs got addressed it worked pretty well.

I like the way the project management and financial management were integrated.
posted by miss tea at 8:37 AM on July 23, 2010

You should take a look at Advantage.
posted by Steve3 at 10:32 AM on July 23, 2010 [1 favorite]

Seconding Advantage. I've used it a couple of smaller agencies that I've worked for, and it seems to work out pretty well for everyone. It also has the, ahem, advantage of having a large, well-connected user base/community.
posted by brand-gnu at 11:50 AM on July 23, 2010

We use Harvest and Stacks.
posted by mumkin at 12:07 PM on July 23, 2010 [1 favorite]

Piggybacking this rather than starting a new one, since it's still open and the question I was going to ask was a subset of this one:

What, specifically, are the advantages of Advantage? Our partners are looking at it seriously. Advantage's website say more or less absolutely nothing about features or implementation cost, which always makes me really suspicious. (Usually in my experience that means "if you have to ask you're not serious and we don't want to try to sell to you".)
posted by lodurr at 6:42 AM on January 12, 2011

Note that Advantage also restricts access to their forum. You have to get administrator approval to join. I've registered; will see if they approve. If not, then I'd count that as a serious source of suspicion. (Don't seem to want to tell us what the software/service actually does, don't want us to contact existing users = bad signs.)
posted by lodurr at 6:49 AM on January 12, 2011