Is Trello 'overkill' for my business?

[Rakesh]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of setting up a property maintenance company that will initially employ
1) Two tradesman undertaking most jobs, as they come in from clients
2) Five subcontractors taking-on extra, out of hour or specialist work
3) Myself, allocating the jobs to each tradesman via a shared calendar.

The Tradesman and Subcontractors will share their daily calendars with me, and I'll send new jobs/appointments to them, as the come in from clients, in the form of meeting requests.

The vast majority of jobs be basic maintenance. For example, a client may book us to change 3 lightbulbs, fix the handle on a cupboard and re-silicon the a shower trey. Once complete, we would send a very simple report back to the client (from myself,) telling them what that we'd completed the tasks, and/or if there were any complications that required more work than anticipated.

Would Trello be overkill for something like this? The are, after all, just three minor task (Cards?) for one appointment (Board?).

Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Rakesh]

@Jodi LeBlanc @Max Foerster - K15t Thanks for your replies.

Somebody from another forum mentioned another way to structure a board, where each appointment was a card, which moved through various columns/stages (eg. booked, attended, quote delivered, job in-progress, etc) until each job reached "completed" status. Does that sound like a sensible way to structure it?

Also, is there a way to connect/sync Trello to a calendar system like Outlook or Google Calendar? Furthermore, is there a way to tie all of this into an accounting system like Xero? 

Thanks for your help. I'm trying to figure out how all these different elements can fit together to keep my workflow organised, without duplication and unnecessary complications.

[Rakesh]

Perhaps something like this:
https://trello.com/invite/b/GEgGNxwt/f507ad49f194175b36af64b94291e59e/property-maintenance

NB. This is something only I will need to use, and another administrator, at the point we grow to take on more Staff. Our Tradesman and Sub-Contractors won't interact with this (unless you can think of a good reason for them to do so?)

[Jodi LeBlanc]

Hi @Rakesh have you checked out the www.trello.com/inspiration boards for ideas? I found a few that may provide some ideas for setting up your board:

The Real estate company has a list of addresses in first column for clients which you could use for your business:

https://trello.com/b/0YXozpoy/real-estate-company

The agile board, which includes on hold and next up lists:

https://trello.com/b/DnZvFigA/agile-board

The renovation board has a few lists that you may find useful too (eg. to do, in-process, done)

https://trello.com/b/4Y0idQQT/kitchen-project

You could build your board with a combination of these boards, or look on the inspiration site for more ideas. Since Trello is a free tool you can always try it out with your team and tweak it as you go.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Jodi

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Hi Rakesh,

I don't think that Trello can be an overkill "at all" if you're looking for a simple way to write things/todos down and simply track them without a specific or sophisticated logic behind. I love Trello for a lot of things where other tools just don't feel like the perfect fit. And as your business will hopefully grow why not at least give it a try. But why would you like to create a single board for every appointment? Doesn't it seem more interesting to, I don't know, have your customers in a board as columns or weekdays and create/assign tasks from there? With a bit of brainstorming a smooth solution for you should be possible. :)

I would additionally encourage you to try Trello for other use cases as well. Just to mention on of my one: I'm using a single private board to note down some timestamps and descriptions (very, very briefly) for later time tracking in Jira (and billing in regards to customer tickets, a second column is for overall todos or noteworthy stuff. After that, every weekday has a column for easy planning (appointments, calls, overall reminders etc.) and the last column works as backlog for the next week. So I'm using this as a simple central hub for different tools.

Best, Max