Using as Consultant to Businesses?

David Prewitt

Does anyone have any "best practices" in using Smartsheet in connection with consulting to businesses? I'm an "outsourced" or part-time CFO/Controller to a variety of businesses. Usually, the business has staff that will perform work under my supervision. Thanks in advance!

Travis

David - what are you looking for assistance with specifically? Are you having trouble getting the staff at the business to use Smartsheet or do you have questions about setting up your sheets and collaborating with users?

David Prewitt

Travis, I primarily want ideas on the best way to set up sheets to collaborate with users from several different companies at the same time as opposed to working with the same team on various projects. For example, I want to see my own tasks in a consolidated view but each client's information should be in it's own sheet (or sheets).

 

Stated another way, I don't want to set up a "system" with 50 sheets but later find out that I should have kept everything in a single sheet or vice versa.

Travis

David, check out this thread. I added a few links to help center articles which can help increase collaboration with other businesses and another user posted comments about how she collaborates with her clients. 

 

It sounds like the reporting tool may be beneficial for you. You can have sheets for each of the companies you are working with and then built a report that pulls in all the tasks that are assigned to you (or any other user). Here is information on reports from our Help Center: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/522214-creating-reports

 

David Owens

David, In your multi-client capacity and given the current feature set of SS, I believe you will need multiple sheets.  I have added my name to the feature request list for row level sharing.  It's been painful not having it.  Workarounds are available though.  Until you have that feature a user is very limited in their ability to share a single sheet requiring row level visibility control.  My answer has been to create individual "plan" sheets for each job/account then aggregate the tasks into a master report that is sorted by a calculated field (overdue days).  When tasks are marked complete they disappear from the report.  This sheet serves as my daily operational "dashboard."