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Skippit
Skippit is a SaaS built to provide different professional service provider organizations (such as software, marketing or design agencies) with a centralized platform to manage all daily operations. Users can manage employee resources, recruitment pipeline, project P&L, staffing and utilization rates. They can also dynamically create project invoices, send them to clients and monitor payment statuses. In addition, users can generate sales and financial reports to analyze their company’s health—all of that in a single, user-friendly platform.
Skippit.ioWe are responsible for
Scope:
Dedicated Agile Team
Team:
8 people
Duration:
1 year – ongoing
Challenge
Professional service provider companies usually need to use single-purpose tools for managing various aspects of their business, like resource management, project staffing, invoicing and profitability management, because there is no unified platform to store and interpret all that data. Therefore, managers at such agencies have to operate in a very fragmented management ecosystem that makes operation management painful and leads to many informational gaps that need to be filled manually by cross-checking data from different tools and Excel spreadsheets.
Solution
We designed and developed an all-in-one solution for professional service providers to bring all core operations into one web platform. The platform allows users to manage employee resources, project commercial terms and finances, monitor resource utilization rates, budgets, margins and overall company profitability in real time while keeping all team members coordinated and synchronized. The platform also automates routine tasks, cuts down on administrative work and boosts efficiency.
Employee Resource Management
- Dashboard: Users can instantly access detailed profiles to find the right fit for their projects based on employee skills, position, and more. They can also easily track the number of full-time employees, freelancers, and active or inactive users.
- Profiles: Users can find enriched employee profiles and export their resumes with just one click. The system also automatically updates years of employee experience.
- Resume management: In outstaffing, it’s essential to customize resumes to meet client specifications. With the change and export feature, users can easily adjust employee profile information to fit client needs, download and save the updated version in the CV History, and keep the original version unchanged.
- Career Logs: In Career Logs, users can gain insights into employee career progression from day one with details on salary changes, position advancements, project involvement, and more.
Projects and Commercial Terms
- Project dashboard: Users can apply filters for a suitable project view and track project status, fees and engagement.
- Projects and Commercial Terms: Users can add staffing to projects through commercial terms, which include start and end dates, staff engagement and commercial details. Income for the specified period is calculated automatically, and term history stores commercial terms chronologically, making it simple to track and reference past agreements with clients.
- Profitability management: Skippit enables users to access real-time profit and loss (P&L) data, providing a comprehensive overview of a project’s financial performance so the teams can make informed decisions for better business outcomes.
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Invoicing and Revenue
- Automated Invoicing: With Skippit’s automated invoicing feature, users can effortlessly generate invoices based on the project’s commercial terms, accounting for time-offs and official holidays. Previously, account managers and project managers had to spend about 4 hours cross-referencing various sources for this information. Now, this feature helps users to create invoices in just 10-15 seconds, eliminating any manual errors.
- Approval Flow: After Project or Account managers create invoices, they’re sent to the finance team for review and approval. Once approved, users will receive a notification and a PDF that will then be sent to the client.
- Invoice Dashboard: Here, users can track the payment statuses of generated invoices and realized revenue using customizable filters. It checks project payment terms to identify any overdue statuses and notify responsible teams.
Staffing & Traffic Management
- Insights Dashboard: On the dashboard, users can view the total billable employee resource capacity, monitor how many of the billable employees are currently staffed, aka see the utilization rates and billable vs non-billable employee ratios
- Staffing Management: This feature allows users to easily access a comprehensive list of employees' staffing details and availability, enabling them to make quick staffing decisions.
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Time-off Management
- Time-off dashboard: The dashboard provides an intuitive interface for users to request, view and manage employee time-off requests. Users can easily navigate and track vacation days, sick leaves, and ongoing projects with user-friendly filters.
- Approval flow: With customizable configs, you can assemble approval flows that allow users to experience the smoothness and transparency of administrative procedures.
- Excluding from invoice: The user can customize the inclusion of time off in invoices for billable employees engaged in Time and Material projects, ensuring transparent management and precise invoices.
Sales and Financial Reports
- Revenue & Income Comparison: Executives can compare expected revenue with actual income and identify discrepancies and their causes.
- Project Revenue & Margins: This feature provides a detailed breakdown of financial insights, including monitoring monthly revenue, analyzing per-project earnings, tracking costs, calculating margins, and monitoring profit.
- Forecasting: The feature ensures accuracy in supply and demand synchronization. Users can use real project data to gain detailed insights into upcoming revenue, costs, and margins.
Recruitment Pipeline
- Filtering: The platform offers easy-to-use filtering options for users to find suitable candidates. Organized into the company’s recruitment stages on a Kanban board, such as HR interview → Technical interview → Managerial interview → Hired or Rejected.
- Automated Transition Management: Users can also apply rules to the recruitment stages. For example, when candidates reach the hired stage, they automatically move to the employee dashboard.
- Candidate Data Tracking: Recruiters can track the candidate interview summaries as well as the reasons for rejection. All this information is stored in one place, which allows technical interviewers to assess their backgrounds and record their evaluations.
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Involvement & Process
Frontend Development
We used the Next.js framework to develop our applications. Our state management was handled through useContext, while Webpack seamlessly bundled our assets. Our development followed the SCRUM framework, organizing tasks into two-week sprints for optimal productivity and efficiency. Tailwind CSS was utilized for UI design, providing a comprehensive and reusable component library.
Adopting a “less is more” philosophy, we prioritized minimalism in our codebase by developing many functionalities in-house and relying only on essential libraries. This approach ensured that our applications remained lightweight, efficient, and precisely tailored to our specific requirements. Github was our primary version control and code management platform that ensured effective collaboration and workflow management.
Backend API
Our project was built using a versatile tech stack. Laravel, our primary framework, was complemented by Laravel Cashier and Sanctum for subscription billing services and secure authentication, respectively. Data management was handled by MySQL, with RESTful API ensuring effective server-client communication. Intervention/image and php-heic-to-jpg were employed for image manipulation, especially for HEIC formats. Laravel-dompdf enabled an easy generation of PDFs from HTML. Spark-stripe facilitated secure online transactions via the Stripe payment gateway. In terms of our continuous deployment pipeline, we leveraged bash scripts and Bitbucket. This allowed us to automate deployment tasks and maintain a consistent delivery process. Altogether, these tools delivered an efficient and robust development environment.
DevOps & Production
We have orchestrated two distinct environments - production and staging - each residing on dedicated Linode machines. This setup allows us to thoroughly vet any changes in the staging environment before promoting them to the production environment.
We employ Wasabi as our preferred solution for image storage, providing us with scalability and efficient retrieval of media assets. As for code management, BitBucket plays a critical role. It facilitates efficient tracking of code changes and promotes collaboration amongst our developers.
Meet the authors
We are a 200+ people agency and provide product design, software development, and creative growth marketing services to companies ranging from fresh startups to established enterprises. Our work has earned us 100+ international awards, partnerships with Laravel, Vue, Meta, and Google, and the title of Georgia’s agency of the year in 2019 and 2021.
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