Workpark review – Manage your finances, HR and much more

Having a platform where you can collect all the information about your company in one place seems like a good idea, but is it? This right here is Workpark, a platform where you can manage your finances, payrolls, even projects, and so much more. Let’s check it out.

So here we are on the Workpark platform and I want to try and take you through some use cases using Workpark. First off, you can see that the logo is in black, even though I would like it to be in white. But that’s just a minor UX thing. We have our mission control here, which is a dashboard of the workload, just some different numbers we can use from the different modules. And then we have, of course, all the modules over here.

1. Features of Workpark
2. Workpark Pricing
3. Alternatives to Workpark
4. Future of Workpark
5. Pros & Cons using Workpark
6. Last thoughts about Workpark

Features of Workpark

We do also have a message module where you can message within your team, or you can actually also message with clients here. At the bottom here we have a dock and that is just a quick overview of your notifications, unread messages, and you can add some sticky notes over here. I’ll just add this one right there. Then I’ll just have that as a note. Then we also have to close down the dock here announcements. An announcement could be to your entire team or to all of your clients.

So it could be that maybe you are off for holiday from 1 January until 20 January. Then you can add that as an announcement in here by just adding, let’s say holiday as a subject. I am out of the office in January, for instance, share with clients and then post it. Then we do also have meetings here and there is actually an integration into Zoom. Here we can add a new meeting, and we can just call it a meeting name actually, to be honest.

Add a colour where it doesn’t really matter, category let’s choose the random one here, meeting type, no category, some description here. And then let’s keep this as is. I’ll just set a date for 28. A little confused why I can’t add the Zoom here as integration, but let’s keep this as is.

So you can see here that I have actually filled everything out.But they’re telling me that the date is Invalid, which it is not. So that’s a little confusing as well. Now let me take you through the first use case and this is that we need to onboard a new colleague. So what we do is go to HR where we have an employee list, then we add a new employee.

Let’s give it employee ID twelve. Let’s call this one my own name Phillip. Then here we have an email. I’ll just write some nonsense. We need to set a password as well.

We can also generate. Then we can set a Slack username when they are going to join, when they will exit. Which is a little strange because it is an employee. So hopefully they won’t exit. We can set the gender over here, address and then some different elements down here. Now, one thing that I noticed is that I can only set an hourly rate in US dollars.

This is an employee and often at least in Denmark, we set monthly rates and I can’t set a monthly rate in here. And I can only work with the US dollar as is. Overall in the system I can change to other currencies, but I can’t change to the Danish currency. Here we choose whether login should be enabled or not. And this is probably back up here where we set a password and email.

We can also choose the Department they need to be within and the designation. We can set up some skills, and then we can upload a photo if we want to. So now an employee has been created. You can see it says up here, Phillip, and it says designer. I can then set a user role.

I’ll just set employee, and now we have the user ready or actually the employee. What we can then do is let’s say the employee needs some holiday that we set in here where we add some holiday. We say from 25. And what the holiday is, we’ll just call this holiday here. Again, I’m actually missing a date range because often a holiday is more dates and I don’t want to sit here and add each of these and write an occasion.

That’s also a bit of something they need to fix. But now I’ve created a holiday here. And again, who is this holiday actually for? Is it for me? Is it for a specific employee?

That is again also missing. We can also set leaves here as well. It works the same way where we can assign some leave. Who is the member? I will say again, Phillip, what is the leave type?

Is it a single day? Is it multiple days? What is the reason? And has it been approved? And yes.

So let’s save this one as well. So now there’s also leave. So now let’s say that everything has gone well, and it is now time to pay out the first salary. So here you can see that we can actually set a monthly salary here even though we couldn’t set it on the employee itself. So let’s just set this one to 10,000 and save it.

So now the salary has been set. We can then either update it when change it. We can either increase it or decrease it. We can see the salary history here as well. And that is about it.

See, I’m really missing a lot here because within salaries, if I just go back to that for a second, at least in Denmark there are a lot of regulations which needs to be followed there needs to be sent into the taxes and so forth. So this is a very, very small version of what a salary module could be. So we definitely need some elaboration on this in the future, but it is a fine start. As mentioned, they do also have a Zoom integration down here where you can have Zoom meetings. We also have the Zoom settings here where you set up the API key and the Zoom secret.

So you still need to sign up for a Zoom account. So that is one type of use case. The other use case is if we want to create a project for a client. So let’s go to customers here and then let’s click on clients. So in here we can add a new client, we’ll just call it Mr. and then client name.

Some nonsense here about email. We can set up an organisation here, there are some different ones. I will just send it to some nonsense data here just so we can create it. It’s really a lot of data I need to enter here in order to just create a client. It would be nice to just have some minimal data, and then I can always add more later on. But now the client has been created.

So let’s go back to the work here into projects and create a project for this client. Let’s call this one project name and for the categories we’ll just create a new category. We’ll call it Website. The start date will be 1 May and the deadline will be 30 June. We can also choose not to set a deadline.

Here we can say whether it should be allowed to manually log the time. Who are the project members? I will set up myself and Phillip and down here is where we set up the client we just created. Let’s say that the project budget is 2000, and we have 1000 hours allocated. Right now the project status is in progress, and I’ll now save it.

So here we have our first project and if I click on it then we can see even more data. We can, of course, see the data that we have entered, but we can also see the progress. But right now we’re missing some tasks here. So, if I go to the task module over here, I can then create new tasks. I’ll create a task here, just very simple.

Choose the project name, call it the task title here. When it’s the start date, the due date is set to the same day and I will assign it to myself. In this case, keep the priority as it is and then press Save. So now we have the first task created, and it is very easy to see. We have the incomplete, completed.

We can also change to a board mode here where we can drag it in between. We can also check it as a workload to see how much workload we actually have? Do we have space to take this task in? Then we have the calendar view up here where we can see the task as well, and then we have the table view also. Right now the task is done, so it is not showing. This flow of creating tasks in a project is not very efficient.

It really takes a long time to create these tasks. I do like the board here. I would like to be able to add more types, so we have incomplete, in progress, in review maybe, and then completed. So the customer or the client needs to always go and see what tasks are in review and then check them out and approve them if they are good enough or give some feedback on them. But this entire ecosystem of the project management system is not so elaborate, and it’s not so efficient.

And this is what you get with these business management software, because they basically need to try and collect so many types of software into one software, and they even need to make it efficient as well. So it’s not always that it’s possible. And that’s why I’m always a little in doubt whether these business management software are a good idea because they are only to a very niche target group, and it’s not always a good idea to really do it this way. But if you don’t care about efficiency, and you just want to have everything collected in one place, then it could be ideal for you to use a Workpark.

Workpark Pricing

When I first saw the pricing of Workpark, I thought to myself that it was quite overpriced until I compared it to the alternative to see why the price is as it is, and that is because of the amount of modules and components you get. However, the pricing of Workpark, the reason why it is as it is because you get the number of users within each plan, whereas the alternatives, for instance, Zoho or Honeybook, you get per user, so you pay per user for the alternatives, whereas you pay for a package of 5, 10, 20 users within Workpark.

But as you can see, they have three plans, and they don’t differ on the amount of features, they differ on the amount of storage you get and the amount of team members you have within one plan. And they do have a 14-day free trial where you can test out Workpark to see whether it’s for you or not.

Alternatives to Workpark

The alternatives to Workpark are first off, Zoho. Zoho is a very well – known product, and they have so many types of products within their umbrella. They have for emails, they have for project management, and they do also have for business management. So, within Zoho you get all the same modules as you get within Workpark.

But Zoho runs a different pricing structure. Here you pay per user, whereas within Workpark you pay for a package of users. The other alternative is Honeybook. Honeybook doesn’t have the exact same amount of modules as we see within Workpark they don’t have the entire HR module for instance, and they are working on the finance module but here it is the same as Zoho where you pay per user so based on these three you really need to figure out where your needs lay.

Future of Workpark

Now let’s take a look at the future of Workpark. First off they’re working at client collaborators. This means that your clients will get access to the platform. Of course, you decide what they get access to, but this will save you a lot of time on communication because the client can check the status themselves. Furthermore, then they’re working on more templates for invoices and contracts then they’re working on a timer in the dock so that we can manage our time and basically record the amount of time that we spend on a specific task and last but not least then they’re working on integrations. And this is to integration platforms like Zapier, SyncSpider, Integromate and so forth. Of course, they’re working on a lot more, but these four elements are what I see as the most exciting coming very soon.

Pros & Cons using Workpark

After using Workpark I really like that everything is collected in one place, but each of these modules is just not elaborate enough.

I can’t set a monthly salary on employees and then the overall feel of the UX is just not there.

Last thoughts about Workpark

The idea of collecting everything in one place like Workpark is great, but they don’t manage to deliver a solution which is fulfilling yet. I want to give Workpark two and a half stars. Their intentions are good, but they really have a long way to go. That’s my review.