Knack for Agencies, Professional Services, and Consultants

Knack is a great tool for professional services organizations to manage their clients and projects. And in this video, we’re gonna dive into exactly why that is the case and why you should consider Knack if you are someone who has an agency or a PS team. First of all, let’s talk about why you should consider Knack. Knack is a powerful no-code platform that allows agencies and professional services partners to build a wide range of custom solutions for managing customers, payments, invoices, resources, and projects.

Cost Efficiency and Speed to Market

But why would they consider a tool like Knack? One of the main reasons is that Knack can significantly reduce the costs associated with developing and maintaining custom client portals compared to hiring developers or purchasing expensive off-the-shelf solutions. Knack can also offer faster speed to market. Agencies often need to deploy solutions quickly to meet client demands or respond to client or market changes, and that’s where we can help you make it quicker and easier to go to market.

Scalability and Personalized Services

By reducing the time and resources spent on developing and maintaining IT infrastructure, agencies can focus more on their core business activities and client services. Agencies can start with a basic setup with Knack and then scale up as their business grows, adding more features and users without a complete overhaul. Agencies can offer better, more personalized services to their clients by utilizing tools specifically designed to meet their operational needs. Now what I’m gonna do here is showcase to you the project management template that we have here at Knack.

Exploring the Project Management Template

So if you log into your account and click on “New App,” you can go to “Start from Sample App,” and I’m going to look up the project management one. So just this one right here, project management, then press “Create App.” You can maintain a database of projects with details like scope, objectives, timelines, and milestones. If you go over here to the different data tables, you’ll see that there are already a myriad of different tables to make this easy for you to handle.

Interconnected Data Tables and Client Management

Also built with interconnected fields to the other tables and different formulas. So for example, go to the records here, just showcasing to you what we have. You’ll see that not only are clients there with their own table, but also the contacts within those different clients. As you can see, it’s connected to CorpBay, for example, and that is going to be a client within here.

Project Details and Milestones Tracking

Different projects are going to reference those specific clients as well. And they’re going to have a lot of amazing fields here, like the start date, the hourly rate, total budget, even who the project manager is in here, which in this case is going to be a connection as well. And in those projects, there’s also going to be different milestones that are related to it. And the formulas in here calculate how many hours it takes, the due date of those specific milestones as well, and also who is assigned that specific milestone.

Task Management and Status Tracking

And last but not least, we have a couple other items here like tasks for specific tracking under those milestones where, as you can see, these tasks are all related to milestones and projects themselves and what employees those are related to. These are complete with a status property to have it adjusted at any point when the project has any updates to those tasks that need to be completed or set to pending start, pending feedback, or active. And then the hours here, along with the costs, are interconnected with the tasks and make sure that at the top line here, we have the total hours, which, as you would guess, comes from the hours that then go to the tasks and project.

Cost Calculation and Budget Management

And that’s how we get all those roll-ups of what are the total costs of the project because of all the different hours, and what is the cost per of these different people’s hourly rates, as well as other costs here, which would be for not only hourly rates, but something like an Adobe license. For example, as you can see here, the total cost of this would be here, which is calculated by the quantity multiplied by the price per. And that connects to the project milestones as well. We have all the different people.

Team Collaboration and Resource Scheduling

We have all the different project layers that are needed in any good project management system. And it’s just a really nice connected setup. Tracking your progress within here is so great, and you can enable team collaboration with features like file sharing. And tracking time is so easy within these systems that we’ve built out.

Additional Project Management Templates

You can create and manage schedules for resources, ensuring optimal utilization with our template. And you can track the availability of resources to avoid overbooking and conflicts. We not only have this project management template, but we also have other ones as well. For example, if we go to “Create New App” again, there is another one.

Freelance Project Management Features

So if we do project management again, we can click on freelance project management, which is really cool too. It allows for the assignment of freelancers to projects and tasks with features to set deadlines and track progress. Time tracking and invoicing are also great within here because, obviously, we have the basic projects and tasks that are kind of within here, but you can create different quotes that you set for those different projects and have all of your different hours time-tracked accurately so you can see what time you spent on tasks and then automatically generate invoices based on that Knack time.

Invoicing and Reporting Capabilities

Makes it a lot easier to invoice your clients. Users can set invoice dates and due dates for streamlined billing and management as well. This template also empowers users to generate reports on project progress, freelancer performance, and profitability for decision-making. In the page section here, you can definitely create those different dashboards to give yourself a better view of the data from the backend and the frontend to handle.

Customer Payment Portal Overview

We also have a great template called the customer payment portal. This portal allows you to do a myriad of different things. It’s great for invoice creation and management, where you can generate and manage different invoices with customizable templates. It allows you to track payment statuses and histories and send automated reminders for overdue payments, which is very important in business.

Payment Gateway Integration

You can also set up an integration with payment gateways. Integrate with payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, or others for online payments, and you can then generate financial reports and analytics to track revenue and outstanding payments. Customers can essentially log in anytime and pay using their credit card and/or a PayPal account using our system. So for example, I’m logging in here as a customer.

Customer Portal Functionality and Security

And inside of this portal, you can set it up as I just mentioned, and customers can store their credit card information—only for Stripe—but still very good that that’s the case. And business managers can charge a customer on their behalf using their stored payment details at any time. This template also works with service requests and invoices, but you can customize the app to work with your custom data. When each customer logs into the customer portal, they will only see the data connected to their customer account, which is great for security.

Customer Engagement and Workflow Integration

Approvals, notifications, and permissions can all be integrated into your customer portal, so your customers can participate directly in your business processes and workflows. You also can embed the customer portal right into your website so your customers don’t even have to leave your site. You’ll see we also have an amazing time card manager template. So in this payroll and time card manager, you can simplify operations by creating an easy-to-use online portal for employees, managers, and HR to manage timesheets and payroll.

Time Card Manager Template Features

There are automated reminders when payrolls are due and notifications when new hours are submitted. You can protect user data using a secure Knack app, ensuring employees’ payroll data is kept confidential. Some of the key features of the portal here are the fact that you can log in. After logging into your account, there are specific dashboards for various user roles for the purpose of viewing various permission-based data.

Payroll Management and Reporting

As you can see right here, you can view or add timesheets here, depending on the level of access you have, and it’s a great dashboard to see everything from the top down. Assignment of pay period initializes time card and timesheet relationships to calculate hours based upon custom payroll codes. Approvals, notifications, and permissions can all be integrated into your payroll app so your team can participate directly in your business’s processes and workflows. Also, you can collectively produce payroll reports by department, location, or code using charts and graphs.

Conclusion and Call to Action

You can export data to utilize in third-party paycheck processors as well. All of these different apps are great ways that you can utilize your processes in a better way here with Knack. If you’re an agency, a professional services company, or consultant, all these different templates are gonna help you in some way to make your processes be more effective. So with that being said, make sure to try out all these different templates today, see what works for you, and we’ll see you in the next one.