According to a Wellingtone study in 2016, more than 30% of organizations never complete a project on time or budget. This is a result of taking on too many projects, change in scope, and poor resource management. Enters Avaza with a beautiful online software suite; making it easy for businesses to handle complex projects, review performance and stay on budget.
Born out of the need to manage consulting teams efficiently and grow profitable consulting businesses, today, Avaza is an all-in-one professional services automation tool that seamlessly combines resource scheduling, time tracking, expense reporting, quoting and invoicing with project management. Founded in 2014, Avaza grew from one user to serving roughly 18,000+ across 150 countries. Its revenue has massively grown by 10-15% every month in the past two years.
Bringing ERP Level Project Management Features to Small Businesses
Aiming to bring ERP level project management features to small businesses at a much more affordable cost, Avaza has re-invented the technology for SMBs with a design that’s really easy to pick up and use. It starts with utilization reports, billable and unbillable time, profitability reports and whether a customer project was financially worth it or not.
Users can sign up for a free plan, or choose from one of their paid plans, starting at $9.95 USD per month. Keeping client satisfaction at the forefront, Avaza’s customer support is available 24/7, including weekends and public holidays. This includes chat and email support, along screenshare calls to troubleshoot more complex problems.
User-experience at its best, Avaza is a highly cost effective solution and provides greater insight into business performance. It gives managers the ability to automate common business processes and gain visibility on team billable utilization and project profitability. It’s also a great tool for small businesses and freelancers, giving them the same professional interface afforded by large companies.
Understanding the Opportunity and Building a World-class Software on it
Tim Kremer and Behram Khan are the founders of Avaza. Both have a background in software consulting. While managing large teams of over 30 consultants, they discovered that there was a significant amount of inefficiency in collaborating on projects with teams and clients. There was no single repository for project tasks and discussions with clients, for time tracking or billing. As a result, there was a lot of duplicated data, out-of-sync customer records and painful manual administration. Joining forces together, they saw the opportunity to create a single project management product that was simple to use, could run a business much more efficiently and provide the transparency to clients, integrated reporting and business insights they craved. Through their vision and hard work, Avaza was incepted and has emerged to be an efficient tool for small businesses.
Going Deep into Solving Business’ Problems at Competitive Rates
Growing the startup – for Tim and Behram – was a “slow and steady” process, and they were faced with the arduous challenge of going up against the project management giants like Trello and Asana, or larger ERP software. However, they differentiated Avaza from the crowd by going deep into solving a business’s problems but at competitive rates.
As a result, Avaza now has Project Management, Resource Scheduling, Time Tracking, Expense Management, Estimate, Invoices, and Reporting. Users can enable various workflows, such as converting estimates to projects, recurring invoices/expenses/tasks, and approval processes for timesheets and expenses.
Offering Multiple Business Solutions in One App
Operating with an integrated approach to project management, Avaza offers multiple business solutions in one app, which means users are able to save time and money as they don’t need to pay multiple subscriptions or sync data between apps. Users can manage clients, projects, timesheets, expenses, estimates and invoices in one place. Also, an intuitive design makes Avaza easy to use, and its customized demos provide users with helpful tips on how Avaza can best work for their business.
Avaza users also have access to features that aren’t available anywhere else such as; 1) Gantt charts based on logged in user’s assignments, 2) Hourly cost and billing rates that are customizable at the project level, 3) Multi-currency support, and 4) Timesheet and Expense approvals with the option to lock approved items from editing.
Leading Experts with an Extensive Experience
Tim has spent the last 10 years consulting & managing enterprise consulting companies in the competitive Australian IT industry. His experience includes developing major projects for Mining, Engineering, Medical, Media, Manufacturing & Finance industries, both in hands-on and leadership capacities. These include leading the team developing the public website for the largest Engineering company in Australia and developing the Intranet for Australia’s largest Media company.
Behram was previously the head of software applications at Australia’s largest media group (Seven Media Group), where he managed teams of 40+ developers in the largest media management system development in the southern hemisphere. He has extensive qualifications & experience in finance, accounting & computer science. He has previously consulted in Oracle Financials.