Epic Coders’ major issue and Hubstaff Tasks’ simple solution

The best stories start from a humble place — a fact that's true for Epic Coders. Before they were an official company, they were just a group of freelancers looking to create the best work possible. But, after a few projects were under their belts, they quickly realized they had something special. Their unique approach to both design and client management put them in a position where they had no choice but to join forces and start building a portfolio of work together.

Epic Coders doesn't consider themselves a design agency. That's because they think agencies get a key thing wrong: The way designers should work with their clients. Epic Coders believes their team members should integrate into their client's companies, not just work on them from afar. They want to work as one with their clients and have a collaborative relationship. But, to make that happen, they needed some help.

Epic Coders needed a way to keep everyone on the same page. For one, their design team needed a way to stay up to date with on-going projects while at the same time planning work and setting budgets for projects that were coming down the pipeline. They also needed a way to be transparent with their clients and give them confidence that they were going to stay on target with deadlines and goals. So, they started to look for a solution to their problems.

Epic Coders realized they had several issues that could all be solved by finding the right tool. With team members all over the world, Alin Spirdon and his team needed a way to communicate project expectations, onboard team members, and keep everyone in-the-know without adding more work onto the team’s plates. With such a small team, they didn't have any extra time to spend on figuring out confusing or complicated project management programs. They needed something simple and straight-forward.

Due to their smaller-sized team, any one person at Epic Coders could be working on several projects at the same time. Not being able to keep track of who was doing what was becoming harder to manage and oversee as time went on.

According to Spirdon, "the projects we worked on went over budget because of some fixes at a later date." They couldn't plan accordingly and, as a result, could damage relationships with clients over money-related conversations — something no growing company wants.

Hubstaff Tasks allows your team to work through projects with weekly sprints. You can see what everyone is working on this week, what's planned for the weeks ahead, and even what projects are on the backlog for the distant future. "We love the sprints feature within Tasks," says Spirdon, "and we've been using it since it launched." Sprints make it easy to prioritize work and move tasks through the workflow, all with one click.

The simplicity of creating a task is exactly why we love Hubstaff Tasks," says Spirdon. And he's right; it only takes a second to set up a task. Plus, each task is jam-packed with helpful features. You can create productivity checklists, set due dates, plan estimates, comment and tag team members about progress, and assign tasks to however many people you need.

Combining Hubstaff Tasks with Hubstaff takes everything to the next level. "Having Hubstaff linked to Tasks makes things super easy when it comes to onboarding," says Spirdon. When you add a new team member to the group, they instantly have access to all the information they need for tracking time and upcoming projects. Plus, by using both in tandem, your team members can track time towards specific tasks while you monitor activity levels on certain projects, make sure your projects are not going over budget, and pay everyone for the work they've done.

Since using Hubstaff Tasks, Epic Coders has been able to work more efficiently and, in their own words, "better collaborate and manage our team to get our costs down." By using Hubstaff Tasks, they're able to work more cohesively as a team and better estimate the cost of their design jobs, all without wasting any extra time on admin work or managing project management.

Spirdon and the team feel very strongly that Hubstaff Tasks was the right move for their business. They are very excited to see how Hubstaff Tasks continues to innovate and grow in the project management space and, according to Spirdon, "We would definitely recommend Tasks to other people. We would do that because of the ease of use and simplicity, which is exactly what we needed.