Project Bubble – Simple, Easy Project Management for Free
Project management and invoicing apps are nothing new to us at sCommerce, of course. These are likely the most common applications on the Web. Name a developer or a startup and you’ll find a link or a project involving some type of project management app, it seems.
ProjectBubble.com has two things that set it apart and make it viable: it’s free and it is geared towards the freelancer or small team.
The application is amazingly easy to use, which is refreshing. PM apps can easily get over bearing and complicated and Project Bubble avoids all of that by sticking to the basics and avoiding the generally useless fluff that many PM apps add in order to appeal to the larger enterprise.
In fact, the Web application is so easy to use that the developer, Stu Green, explains the entire thing from signup to management to invoicing in a five minute video. That should give you an idea of how easy and simple this app really is.
Project Bubble starts with a screen displaying all of your current projects in a table. They are marked as active or inactive, have simple markers and links for tasks, total time spent (and billables), etc. The bars of the table are color-coded by project due date.
When you create a project, the tasks and/or To-Dos can be listed as billed at a flat rate or billed by time spent. A simple time clock can be activated while you work on tasks and deactivated to calculate total time spent on the task.
Once a project is complete, you can have an auto-generated invoice created, fill in any extra information you’d like the invoice to have (including tax and such) and download the invoice as a PDF for sending to the client or give the client the invoice URL so they can view it online. Payments can be accepted in all of your normal avenues and Project Bubble offers no payment options Paypal in their software. When an invoice is paid, you can mark it as such and it will be removed from your open projects/invoices list.
Overall, the app is very simple and effective and most freelancers and small shops will likely find it useful. Being free doesn’t hurt it either.
