A Guide to Project Management Software for Small Businesses

The right project management software can be a significant driver of success for a small business, where time is of the essence and resources are often limited. Project managers may handle less complex projects, but they face the additional challenge of fewer resources.

Project management software helps small companies allocate resources, stay on schedule, and track project success, whether working remotely or in an office. This essential tool centralizes information, conversations, files, and assets in a single source of truth . Read on to learn the features and benefits of project management software for small businesses — you'll also discover how to:

How to integrate project management software into a small business

Integrating project management software into a small business helps to codify workflows, speed up operations, and keep projects within budget. Outline how your business currently operates — include resources, project scope , production process, and other useful information. This helps to identify inefficiencies in your business process before integrating project management software. Then, follow the steps below:

How do small businesses benefit from project management software?

Nailing a repeatable process and scaling efficiency is of high priority in small businesses. Project management software helps to achieve these and more. Below are other benefits of project management tools for small businesses:

Which features should you look for in project management software for small companies?

Most project management software includes tools to facilitate planning , collaboration, and schedule management . Listed below are essential features to look for in project management software for small teams.

In-app communication

The best project management software allows in-app communication , sending notifications to team members and using built-in chat features to facilitate secure collaboration.

Dashboards

Dashboards provide an overview of progress at an individual, team, and department level. They display useful metrics on ongoing projects and highlight problematic areas. Pin important projects and choose what to monitor in your dashboard.

File sharing

File sharing in project management software makes it possible for managers and team members to share, store, and work on digital assets and documents in a centralized platform.

Multiple views

The best project management software for small businesses offers multiple views to manage tasks and timelines. This allows team members to work according to their tastes and view projects from different angles. Project management software typically has:

Cloud storage

Good project management provides cloud storage , so your information and data are easily accessible whenever you have an internet connection (and accurate security access). Team members can upload files and other information from your project management software directly onto the cloud. This encourages flexibility and productive remote working . Tasks get done faster regardless of where your teams work from.

Mobile applications

With teams working remotely and from home post-COVID , the right project management enables you to oversee projects on the go. Small business managers and teams can work from different locations and not miss a beat. Project management mobile apps ensure you don't have to be sitting in front of a desktop to contribute to a project.

Templates

Many project management software programs include templates you can customize to avoid starting from scratch with every new project. The most popular project management templates help small businesses with ticketing, product launches, service delivery, marketing campaigns, project planning, goal-setting, and tracking.

Team roles and permissions

As you invite teams and external contributors to your project, it's essential to set customizable project permissions . Some people may need view-only access, while others need full admin rights. The best project management software for small teams grants user, role, and access permissions to determine what information specific users can view and edit within the software.

Seamless integration

Your project management workflows are the core of your business operations. The best project management software tools connect and integrate easily with your other work applications — e.g., Salesforce for sales teams – to create a secure and centralized platform for your business data, projects, and reports. Without integration , you would have to pull data out of separate applications and manually combine them to synthesize insights, increasing the risk of errors.

What pricing plan should you expect from a small project management software account?

Project management software pricing typically varies depending on the number of users, features, and billing frequency, e.g., annual or monthly billing. Most project management software offers freemium plans or free trials .

When you have outlined your business needs and requirements, you’ll have clarity on what you need from your project management software. With this information, choose software that provides the project management features you need at a reasonable price. You should also calculate the cost of training your teams to use the software.

Is it possible to upgrade project management software for small teams once they grow?

Start with a free version of your chosen project management software and upgrade as your team grows. The best project management software platforms provide options to add more users, features, and support for small businesses and teams as they expand.

Depending on your business requirements for project management software, you may need to contact the support team of your chosen project management software provider to get a custom quote and product demo before upgrading. Read online reviews and testimonials before investing in premium project management software for small businesses.

Are project management tools for small businesses good for remote companies?

One of the most important benefits of small business project management software is enabling remote working and collaboration with internal and external teams and collaborators.

Whether you're working in an office, from home, or in other remote locations, you can make your project management software the remote HQ for your business. Invite team members and collaborators to join your digital workspace. Ensure that you assign them appropriate permissions to communicate, work, and gain visibility into relevant aspects of your projects.

What is the best project management software for small businesses?

Our top recommendation for project management software for small businesses and teams is UDN Task Manager . In addition to the basic features most project management software offers, UDN Task Manager provides:

Real-time activity streams

Activity streams combine project management with real-time chat and updates, empowering small business managers and teams with fast, interactive features for remote and in-office collaboration. UDN Task Manager activity streams give a big-picture perspective of ongoing projects. Team members can edit tasks and project information with all changes saved in UDN Task Manager automatically, so there's no conflict between users' input.

Small business managers and teams can navigate between live project updates and details of a particular task. When anyone finishes a task or updates a project, it's automatically shown in the activity stream. UDN Task Manager 's activity stream keeps everyone in the loop with each other's progress, enhancing collaboration in real-time.

Work intake and dynamic request forms

Dynamic request forms allow you to create and assign tasks based on your business needs. For example, a small construction company would have request forms with different input fields than a small digital marketing agency. UDN Task Manager request forms allow you to capture various fields and manage inbound requests as tasks, projects, or projects from a template in UDN Task Manager .

The form questions change based on information the requester provides as they fill it out. This ensures small business teams easily get the information they need to get to work quickly without asking unnecessary or repetitive questions. UDN Task Manager ’s dynamic forms automatically assign tasks to the right team members as soon as a request form is submitted.

Integration with 400+ work apps

UDN Task Manager integrates easily with Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, Slack, and many more essential work applications. The UDN Task Manager Integrate add-on connects to cloud-based and on-premises apps and enables custom automation to UDN Task Manager . This vastly reduces the time spent transferring information and switching between work applications. It also ignites the power of automation and helps to create an unbroken workflow.

Integrating with other work apps helps to extract reports and insights that improve your business. UDN Task Manager 's integrations and automation capabilities go beyond one-off, haphazard integrations with little benefits to provide in-depth customization for your business needs and powerful workflow automation, eliminating manual effort.

Proofing and approval functionalities

UDN Task Manager offers proofing and approvals functionalities. Collaborators can see each other's comments and work through conflicting feedback in real-time. Assigned reviewers and approvers can make changes in a document, digital asset, web content, or website page. Edits are crossed off as they're made and the corresponding task marked as "reviewed" or "approved."

UDN Task Manager 's proofing feature increases the ease and ability of the review and approval process across a small business, accelerating project progress and eliminating the risk of errors. Feedback, comments, and approvals are tracked and stored in one centralized location. Internal and external stakeholders can weigh in on a work-in-progress without email back-and-forths or lost communication and time.

360° visibility into projects and teams

Certain projects can get lost in the flurry of daily business activity as more urgent tasks are prioritized. Sometimes important but not urgent tasks are forgotten about until it's too late. UDN Task Manager alleviates this problem by providing 360° visibility into every ongoing project as well as a summary overview. The ability to showcase both high-level and detailed information on ongoing projects – how many projects are in progress, who's working on what, how often deadlines are met or missed — helps small business managers stay on top of things at all times. Go deep into your projects, tasks, and reports generated in UDN Task Manager to measure team efforts, project progress, and other critical metrics. This helps you keep your business objectives on track and make decisions based on real-time data.

24/7 customer support

No matter how easy software is to use, you're likely to have questions and issues. Most small businesses do not have dedicated IT teams, and this is where UDN Task Manager steps in. UDN Task Manager provides multiple forms of support for users:

With a new free plan that allows unlimited users, free 2GB of storage, and subtask management (in addition to the usual task management capabilities), UDN Task Manager 's project management software for small businesses saves teams a lot of time and energy. If you're a small business owner or manager struggling to get your employees to work efficiently and in sync, start with a two-week free trial of UDN Task Manager 's software today.