Flowlu Review 2023: Best Business Management Software?

When it comes to managing projects, the Agile methodology has proven to be one of the most successful approaches. Flowlu's Agile project management takes this approach and maximizes it to deliver great results for businesses.

With Flowlu's Agile project management, teams can easily:

• Create projects
• Distribute tasks
• Create sprints

Its collaborative interface allows team members to see the progress and status of each task in real time.

Flowlu's Agile project management feature offers an intuitive board system that helps you visualize your workflow, so you can see bottlenecks and address them quickly.

If your teams frequently utilize agile methodology, using Flowlu is a no-brainer, in our opinion.

One of Flowlu's standout features is its robust financial management capabilities that truly make it a one-stop shop for all your business needs.

With Flowlu, you have the ability to create the following with ease:

• Invoices
• Recurring invoices
• Estimates

We were able to create invoices for clients and employees throughout our testing easily. Here's an example of a sample invoice we created in just a couple of minutes to see how easy it was.

Spoiler alert: it was a breeze.

This is a game-changer for small business owners who often have to juggle multiple tools to manage their finances.

In addition, Flowlu allows you to view the following in one place easily:

• Cash flow forecasting
• Payment calendar
• Invoices sent and paid

This means you can quickly track your cash flow and stay on top of payments without any hiccups. After conducting an in-depth three-month review of Flowlu's financial management capabilities, we were thoroughly impressed by its intuitive interface and high level of functionality.

Gone are the days of sifting through endless spreadsheets and manually managing your finances. With Flowlu, you can streamline and optimize your sales process to ensure your business is always in top shape.

When it comes to task management, Flowlu is the real deal.

We put the software to the test by creating some onboarding tasks that we typically deal with at Small Business Bonfire.

Here's what it looked like when we created a task called "WordPress training completed (new users)."

We especially liked how we could easily create and customize a checklist. This made it easy to see the progress in each task, so nobody was confused about what still needed to be completed.

Plus, we were able to enable time tracking with just a few clicks, allowing us to see exactly how long it took to complete a specific task.

We were able to switch between the following views to manage our tasks easily:

• To-do list
• Templates
• Kanban
• List

Here's how our list view looked. We preferred this view throughout our testing, as it gave the most comprehensive overview of each task.

All in all, task management is a crucial part of managing your business, and Flowlu makes it easy (without breaking the bank).

Flowlu's email integration is a game-changer for any business. With the ability to automatically sync emails with tasks, contacts, and projects, this feature simplifies communication and eliminates the need to switch between different tools.

With Flowlu, we were able to accomplish the following easily:

• Email our CRM contacts
• Manage all emails in one place
• Integrate MailChimp for email marketing efforts

Flowlu also allows you to track email communications with customers and clients, giving you a complete view of your interactions with them.

We got started by syncing our Small Business Bonfire Gmail account with Flowlu.

Here's a screenshot to really illustrate how easy it was.

Overall, by pairing our email account with Flowlu, we were able to streamline our email efforts across the board (in conjunction with their MailChimp integration).

Our takeaway was that while Flowlu lacked some of the advanced email marketing features we've seen from other platforms, they managed to provide a convenient and surprisingly robust email integration.

Flowlu offers some powerful automation capabilities. This allows you to streamline business processes all-around and focus on what matters—growing your business.

Some different types of automation that you can create include the following:

• Notifications
• Webhooks
• Task
• Field update

To create an automation, simply navigate to your account settings, click the automation tab, and then the create rule button.

We were able to easily create some pretty handy automations to enable us to work smarter, not harder.

One such automation was a notification that alerted specific team members whenever a new project was created.

We were able to create this rule within a matter of minutes (pictured below), with no coding knowledge necessary.

It is worth pointing out that if you want to get into the more complicated automations, such as webhooks, there's a bit of a learning curve to it. However, Flowlu offers a ton of helpful articles to help you out if you get stuck.

Flowlu was designed with collaboration in mind. So, naturally, there are a lot of tools to help teams succeed.

For example, each person has their own account where they can do the following:

• Create unique user profiles with pictures
• View tasks assigned to each user
• See ongoing projects they are a part of
• Message team members

We really liked the team chat feature, which allowed us to communicate about projects in real time with everyone involved.

Typically, we use Slack for our communications, but this could potentially be faster for companies with a lot of different teams working on several projects at once.

Instead of having to create individual channels on Slack, you could simply have a channel with everyone involved in a specific project. That way, it's clear exactly who is working on what without having to go back and forth between platforms.

Here's our group chat related to a publishing project at Small Business Bonfire.

Some other collaboration capabilities of Flowlu include:

• User groups
• Project and task notes
• User roles
• User invitations

Ultimately, when it comes to team collaboration, Flowlu has some amazing features. The fact that it made us question using Slack for our communications should speak for itself!

Flowlu includes an insightful mind-mapping tool that allows you to visualize your ideas in a creative way.

We especially liked that it was easy to export these maps as images, allowing us to share them with our team members and clients without any hassle.

The drag-and-drop feature made it incredibly simple to create complex diagrams in just minutes—detailing our company's vision in a way that was easy to read.

Here's our view of the creation process midway through our mind map for Small Business Bonfire.

The whole process took less than 10 minutes from start to finish. Whether you're brainstorming new ideas or detailing your company vision, Flowlu makes it easy.

Last but certainly not least, Flowlu also provides customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities in addition to everything else they offer.

What's really great about Flowlu's CRM offering is that it integrates with all the features, from task and project management to email integration.

Some CRM features that Flowlu provides include:

• Deal management
• Activity tracking
• Contact management
• CRM automation

We were particularly impressed with how easy it was to migrate our contacts across platforms, thanks to Flowlu's contact import feature.

The process only took a few minutes and allowed us to keep all our existing customers in one place.

Our takeaway: while Flowlu offers some great CRM features, such as powerful contact management and CRM automation, they are a bit lacking when it comes to sales and marketing tools overall.

In this case, Flowlu's CRM is more of an appetizer than the main course when it comes to features.