Employee efficiency is a top priority for most successful firms. Utilizing the right software responsibly can help firms and their staff be more productive. Here is a short list of five software/services that Clearview Software employees use to get things done:

Slack - Messaging

Most executives and managers are swimming in a sea of email. The Radicati Group estimates the number of business emails sent and received totals 122 emails per day. An internal team communication tool like Slack, can help your team communicate and collaborate in real-time.

According to Slack’s website, teams find a 48.6% reduction in internal email and a 25.1% decrease in meetings by using Slack. Open and private chat channels allow conversations to include the right participants.

We use Slack to communicate more effectively and openly. Slack helps our staff feel more connected to internal and remote team members. Slack integration allows us to get notifications from external sources like our Support site and react more quickly through a single interface.

Calendly - Appointment Scheduling

Scheduling meetings with clients, contractors, collaborators, and colleagues can be painful. Finding a time that’s good for everyone can turn into a game of phone or email tag. Calendly eliminates the back and forth of coordinating appointments by letting invitees book a convenient time, based on your availability.

We use Calendly to schedule calls, demos, training, and consulting. The process is smooth and saves us and our invitees time.

Jing - Screen Capture

A picture is worth a thousand words and video is even better. Jing allows you to capture what you see on your screen as an image or video. An annotated image or a short video with audio commentary can save you from typing out lengthy paragraphs of text. Images can be annotated and pasted directly into an email client or Slack. Files can be quickly shared over the web via Jing’s built in functionality.

We use Jing to provide visuals in email, Slack messages and Support tickets. This helps make our messages shorter, clearer, and more concise.

Confluence - Collaboration

Confluence is a simple yet powerful wiki that allows teams to share information. Company intranets often become stale because they are not collaborative. Sharing information on your intranet doesn’t have to be bottlenecked by one administrative person. With Confluence it’s easy for any employee with access to share their knowledge and benefit from the knowledge of others.

We use Confluence to answer internal questions, document internal policies and procedures, conduct retrospectives on projects, and give employee shout-outs.

Clearview InFocus - Time & Expense, Accounting, and Dashboards

Surprise, we use Clearview InFocus. InFocus allows us to quickly enter time and expenses inside the office or on the go. Entries can be associated to projects to capture costs and turnaround billing quickly. Supporting files like receipts can be attached to Expense Sheets and other record types for documentation.

In addition to being our accounting system, we use InFocus’ ability to aggregate data from multiple sources into one central location on InFocus Dashboards. Our dashboards help us monitor financials, our support system, user feedback, our user wishlist, and many other aspects of our business. Data is displayed in the form of numerical KPIs, charts, dynamic grids, and interactive applets.

By “eating our own dog food” we get to experience our software from the perspective of a user. This gives us great insight and helps us with ongoing development and support. We have designed InFocus for A&E firms but it has the flexibility to match our unique business processes through mature custom workflow and dashboard systems. InFocus gives us the functionality and visibility that we need to run our business.

About the Author: Gerald Cox is the Director of Business Development at Clearview Software. Clearview makes InFocus, a comprehensive ERP system built for A/E firms. Previously overseeing technology at an AE firm, Gerald knows the ins-and-outs of many software systems, including InFocus. He enjoys helping people in the A/E space solve problems and connect with each other. He can be reached gcox@clearviewsoftware.net.

You can meet with Clearview Software at THRIVE 2016 - THE A/E/C INDUSTRY SUMMIT.  They are a sponsor and exhibitor at the event to be held October 12-14 in Nashville. This is just one of many reasons why you should join us in Nashville!  Over the years, CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and other senior-level A/E/C firm leaders from around the world have made sure they don’t miss out on this unique two-day event.  In fact, we see many firm leaders come with five, ten, or more members of their leadership team to absorb all that the conference has to offer.