Hello world!

Why we built Allio.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of job and project management solutions on the market. They have varying levels of complexity of features and usability. Some are built focussing on large enterprise businesses, some, like Allio are built with small and medium businesses in mind.

Building a new solution to compete is risky, with so many competitors on the market and expectations high about what software should deliver, means barriers to entry are ever growing.

However, looking at these factors didn’t “curb our enthusiasm” 🙂 to build something to help support service business’ operations. This is because many of the solutions on the market are either very niche task based systems OR more comprehensive, established solutions that haven’t seen the ongoing investment needed to keep them modern. This creates opportunity. This is why we went ahead with our build.

What we built.

We started with the core concept that if you don’t know whether you made money on a job/project, then you don’t know the types of jobs to do in the future. Similarly, if you don’t know the types of customers/clients that are profitable for work for, you won’t know who to go after, and who to fire.

So a sound financial model underpins the product. You can prepare quotes with cost information to ensure margin and once accepted, turn that into a job and track actual time/labour and costs against that original quote. To keep cash flowing, you can send deposit invoices, make progress claims and at the end of the job, measure profitability and performance.

This is very much the start of the project or what’s described as a minimal viable product (MVP). This forms the base on which we will grow the feature set.

What’s next.

Although we are launching now we have some additional work to do to finish the base product with the immediate focus to on:
– Improving scheduling and calendar views of assigned jobs.
– Getting the mobile apps launched on the Apple app store and Google play store.
– Improving the data import wizard, allowing additional information to be uploaded.
– Adding user roles and permissions.
– Building contact relationships.
– Building recurring jobs and invoices.

How can you help?

If you’re interested, sign up for a trial, have a play and let us know what you like, don’t like and what you think could be improved. The more feedback we get the faster we can improve the product. As mentioned it’s early days for Allio.

If you sign up, it works for you and you can see the vision for the software, consider signing up for one of our ‘coming soon’ plans. We will grandfather you on that plan for as long as you stick with us and all new features will be added to your plan.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by, we hope we can help you and your teams manage your jobs, clients, quoting and invoicing!