What is the best way to use Trello with my clients sending me tasks and we track them together?

Question

Hi,

I am a freelancer with at least a dozen active clients at any given time.

I am trying to find an intuitive way for me and my clients so that they can send me their task request using Trello and we both can track whether the tasks are complete or not. The tasks are often not too complicated (they don't require a 3rd person's collaboration or anything) it is just that at times there are too many tasks from too many clients at a time. I find myself bombarded with emails with task requests.

I have been using Trello for my own to do list for a while but never discovered the power features. On a side note, I use Harvest to track my time (always work by the hour) and I recall it was possible to integrate Harvest and Trello.

Should I use Teams or what? I would appreciate your expertise on this.

Thanks in advance.

Ps. I am on Trello's free plan.

Iain Dooley · Answer

@Bora Uslusoy Okay cool, if that's answered your question can you please mark the answer as accepted? That way I get my little Trello treats and can feel happy with my life.

Bora Uslusoy · Answer

@Iain Dooley thank you for your response. There is a lot of info in there, I  appreciate. I will digest it and try out suggestions.

I should leave out the time tracking matter bc I am very happy with Harvest and billing. I shouldn’t fix it when it’s not broken. No intention of integrating another app in the equation. Thanks again.

Iain Dooley · Answer

@Bora Uslusoy if you want clients to create cards via Trello then you'll need one board per client. It would be a good idea to link these boards back to cards in an "overview" board, then you can track clients' lifecycle as well as specific tasks.

Another option would be to give out the email to board address for each of those boards and get your client to save it so that they use that to send new requests to you. Just beware that sometimes Trello will automatically group emails into threads and add a comment to an existing card, which means you won't see a new card created for that request, and you also will get no notification about a new comment on that card unless you're subscribed to it. This happens even if the card is archived, so I've found the email to board feature is basically unusable for that reason, there's too much risk of missing a new request from a client if it's attached to an existinc ard.

You can also create tasks from emails using one of the gmail or outlook plugins, or Benko Board which allows you to use Trello as a Gmail client.

Harvest doesn't integrate with Trello except through a power up or a chrome extension, which means you can't use the Harvest mobile app to track time very well on Trello cards.

TimeDoctor's mobile app integrates in the background with Trello so you can use it like a punchclock, I've always preferred it. Their desktop app is horrible but the mobile app is great.