Working with clients is the foundation of service businesses, so streamlining your processes for getting work done that's on time and on budget is key to providing a service that delights your clients. While you can optimize your own workflows, how many times have you been left waiting on a client to sign off on something... and it sets your whole project back? Probably a few.
That’s why we built a sign-off tool - it’s a great way for you to request a client’s approval as you work through projects and tickets with them, for a more seamless process that let’s you know the status of your request (so things don't fall through the cracks). Before this update, you probably had client work to be signed off on, but once you requested it, had no way of tracking it as part of a status progression. You might’ve found yourself in situations where, even though your projects were forecasting to be on time and on budget, a hold up from a client regarding a sign-off wasn’t accounted for, so the time lost there couldn’t be reported on. Suddenly your project is running a bit behind because you’re waiting for a sign-off, but when you came into your business dashboard, it wasn't clear why - until now.
With our sign-off tool, you get a clearer view of what’s holding your project up and automate your workflows even more by configuring a progression for a sign-off to occur within a project or issue status change. With better tracking for sign-offs, now you’ll have the ability to configure even more workflows, and not have to worry about remembering to loop back in with a client. Previously, sign-offs used to be attached to projects as a whole, so you weren’t able to track the status of one as you moved through your workflow. Put into context, if you sent one to a client and they didn’t see it, reply, or sign-off on it, you’d get no status update letting you know that it’s stalled - you had to remember on your own to follow up, and weren’t able to have that hold-up accounted for in your project reporting.
You can attach sign-off requests as statuses within a project with progressions (i.e. you can track the status of a sign-offs as 'waiting'), and get a clear view on where things are at. You can also track time on how long you’ve been waiting for a sign-off, so if a client is taking lots of time to sign-off on something, you can show them real data on how that has eaten into the budget! This also gives you better reporting since your budget will be accurate as you’ll be able to see how much time was spent waiting on a client, which works particularly well with the new Important Dates feature we recently rolled out. Or, if you happened to stumble across this post and want to see how Accelo can streamline your business, sign-up for a trial - it's free!
