New eBook: 16 Reasons Why Finance & Legal Teams Use Wrike

November 19, 2021 - 5 min read

Brandon Weaver

Working in finance or legal, you may think that a collaborative work management system (CWM) isn’t applicable to your industry. Budget forecasting, number-crunching for mergers and acquisitions, contracts, getting approvals — all of these involve multiple steps and require team input both inside and outside the organization. With no access to a CWM for finance and legal teams to manage everything, getting work done is more difficult and time-consuming than necessary.

That isn’t to say that NetSuite, QuickBooks, and proprietary software don’t deserve a place in the day-to-day routine. Finance and legal teams ought to have the freedom to enhance their workflows. They also deserve to have a versatile platform that improves collaboration and is customizable to their preferred way of working. The cherry on top would be if the solution came equipped with automation technology to eliminate repetitive tasks and speed up approvals.

Wrike is that solution — and you’ll see how in our new eBook, 16 Reasons Why Finance & Legal Teams Use Wrike. After all, product and marketing teams aren’t the only ones who get to have all the fun working in a CWM solution.

16 reasons why organizations should choose Wrike’s CWM for finance and legal teams

Our new eBook is split into eight key areas and includes everything from accounting and forecasting to legal review and IP management. Each section details a common use case and demonstrates how your team can use Wrike to improve collaboration and create a single source of truth. Get access to the eBook here: 16 Reasons Why Finance & Legal Teams Use Wrike

Inside the eBook, you’ll learn:

The eight key areas in which finance and legal teams trust Wrike
The 16 use cases Wrike is uniquely equipped to solve
Visual examples of how Wrike enables finance and legal teams to work smarter and more efficiently

New eBook: 16 Reasons Why Finance & Legal Teams Use Wrike 2

Wrike features that apply to all finance and legal teams

Along with the 16 use cases, the eBook spotlights the following Wrike features:

Single source of truth: Wrike is your hub to manage all your work, including approvals, assets, tracking work progress, calendars, etc.
Wrike Integrate: Comprehensive workflow automation using a low code, visual interface. Our built-in system lets you connect Wrike to nearly any app — and as many apps as you need — enabling you to sync data and fully automate your workflows, including NetSuite, QuickBooks, SAP, Shopify, Stripe, and many more.
Wrike Blueprints: These help you manage your projects, folders, and tasks and plan your work while keeping it separate from ongoing assignments. Blueprints are especially useful with recurring work items because you can use them to quickly create tasks, folders, or projects with attributes you’ve already specified. Create a Blueprint from scratch, save existing work as a Blueprint, or launch new work using a Blueprint you’ve saved.
Budgeting: Estimate and track financials across all projects in one place and in real-time. Budgeting allows you to improve projects’ profitability from the planning phase through the execution, including preferred currency settings, hourly rates, and more.
Spending approvals: Organize the review process for your team and send your work to the appropriate stakeholder for sign-off with a few clicks. No more chasing people down, just faster turnaround times.
Visual asset proofing and Document Editor: Mark up visual assets, centralize feedback across teams, shorten feedback loops, and reduce overall approval times. The Document Editor allows you to edit attachments (like invoices) without having to download the item.
Cross-tagging: Provide full transparency into all your team’s work so they can track it alongside their unique workflows. No other solution can match Wrike’s cross-tagging capabilities.
Shared calendars: Sync all your projects to a team calendar so any changes get updated automatically for everyone. Plus, enjoy 360-degree visibility into all your team’s work, track work progress, and identify potential bottlenecks before they happen.
Dynamic request forms: Our automated project intake system allows you to route work requests to the correct stakeholder based on the form’s inputs and start every project with all the necessary details available. Forget about having to ask (or re-ask) what needs to be done — your custom form will capture everything.
And more!

Get all 16 use cases here

NetSuite, QuickBooks, and proprietary software all have a place in your workflow, and a CWM solution is a great add-on loaded with functionality to support your work. Download our newest eBook, 16 Reasons Why Finance & Legal Teams Use Wrike, featuring all 16 unique use cases, and learn why brands like Gheen & Co., Moneytree, and Kalexius trust Wrike to manage all their work.

Brandon Weaver

Brandon Weaver is a former Senior Content Marketing Manager of Wrike. Early in his professional career, he worked with Conan O’Brien and ate breakfast at his house. He shares a birthday with Elvis, loves traveling, appreciates a great tagline, has a healthy obsession with the Golden State Warriors, and his favorite quote is “Keep smiling, it looks good on you.” At Wrike, he wrote about collaboration, project management, and how automation makes work not only easier, but better. Isn’t that what we’re all here for?

#Wrike News #Professional Services

Wrike Tips 7 min read

Why Your CWM Must Have BI Reporting Tools and Workload Management Built-In

We’ve come a long way in a short time during this blog series. So far we’ve detailed: Leveraging an organized project intake method, rather than managing work in spreadsheets Enhancing team collaboration and speeding up design asset approvals Automating repetitive tasks and moving work forward fast Improving client transparency, sharing, and tracking project progress The final article is about digital advertising reporting, managing team resources, and ensuring all your work stays secure. Compiling digital campaign data is laborious Digital marketers have more data at their fingertips than they can manage, and as advertising spend continues to rise, the need to optimize campaigns grows stronger. The growing digital advertising spend only adds to the mountain of data marketing executives are accumulating elsewhere in automation and analytics platforms. Meanwhile, CMOs and other marketing leaders have identified two blockers to effectively using analytics: Proving the value of analytics to marketing efforts Demonstrating the overall impact that investing in data will have on their organization Curating all the available data is challenging because everyone, including non-technical members, must be able to view, interpret, and act on it in real time without requiring external resources. Of course, numerous BI reporting tools can tap into the digital marketing channels, yet the data often requires an analyst to interpret it for marketing team members. Even when data is extracted by data reporting tools, it’s not standardized in a uniform view. YouTube and LinkedIn, for example, have “subscribers” and “followers,” respectively. Both are the same metric but are traditionally looked at separately. After standardizing the data, presenting it in an actionable way remains a struggle. Digital marketing moves too fast for teams to mess around attempting to interpret the findings so they can iterate in real time. Think about ad auctions where it takes, at most, 300 milliseconds to complete an auction, of which billions occur every hour. Data review and adjusting strategy that takes weeks or months isn’t acceptable. Marketing leaders must have complete visibility and an easy way to automate data collection so they can iterate in real time to optimize results. Balancing team workloads is an ongoing issue If you collaborate with freelancers, an agency, or a professional services team, you know that to maintain profitability, team workload management is crucial. Too much work and you’ll have a long backlog you’ll never get to address. Not enough work and you may struggle to keep everyone working at full capacity. In both scenarios, you need a workload management tool that empowers you to reprioritize and reassign work in an instant. Then, there’s the issue of billable versus non-billable work. Not maximizing billable hours opens the door for more non-billable activities that won’t contribute to the bottom line. When you don’t have full visibility into everyone’s capacity and work coming down the pipeline, how can you expect to balance their workload and maintain profitability? It’s an ongoing headache and one that can be avoided once you have a CWM solution with built-in capabilities for time tracking and resource management. Your data isn’t behind lock and key Company-wide, teams operate with a variety of sensitive information — financial and legal documents, employee records, upcoming product announcements — that requires extra safeguarding. Coupled with the digital transformation era and the global shift to cloud computing and securing data gets even more complicated. From the organization’s perspective, the cloud serves two key benefits: huge savings and the convenience of accessing resources and data without having to manage the servers that store the data. Meanwhile, these same companies also want to enjoy the benefits of collaborative work technology, especially highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services. These industries must comply with even more strict rules, so they often forgo using any cloud apps. All want to be reassured that their work will only be accessible to those with permission and won’t fall into the wrong hands. Without that level of enterprise data security, companies run the risk of failing to comply with federal regulations but also losing their customers’ trust. But who controls the data and who has access? If you don’t know or aren’t satisfied with the answer, look for a CWM that offers enterprise data security software with encryption codes and a digital paper trail of who accessed the data and when. How Wrike solves each pain point Wrike Insights Wrike’s advanced reporting and business intelligence enables you to sync with 50+ apps for real-time digital campaign performance data, including Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, AdRoll, Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo, TikTok, and more. By unlocking this cross-channel analysis, users get 360-degree visibility into campaign performance and where to iterate for the best results without requiring BI reporting tools or data analysts. Built-in data visualizations and analytics dashboards will help your team be more confident on where to take action to maximize ROI. Wrike Resource Management As workloads increase and your team scales, Wrike Resource Management allows complete team availability at a glance with shared tasks, folders, and projects so that managers can reprioritize or reassign work as necessary and optimize performance. It’s a single, collaborative workload management tool that anyone — even external stakeholders — can access from anywhere. Here you can plan, schedule, and allocate resources to set priorities and distribute work. The built-in time tracker and detailed timesheets let you measure effort and review how long projects take to complete. Meanwhile, the Workload view allows you to boost performance and prevent employee burnout by reassigning and reprioritizing tasks based on bandwidth. With this additional transparency, team leads can manage dependencies using Gantt charts and prevent bottlenecks from happening via Table view. Packaged all together, it’s true end-to-end quote-to-cash visibility where you can balance team workloads and help ensure profitability. Wrike Lock Keeping data secure in the modern age goes beyond username and password login details. Wrike’s enterprise data security provides users with customer-managed encryption keys along with an extra layer of encryption by locking the keys to their data. Think of it this way — it’s akin to having a secret code name to get access to the vault’s password, before you can see what’s behind the vault. Furthermore, Wrike doesn’t store your master encryption key, so only you have access. Wrike customer feedback Derick Dahl, Director of Product at Sonance, speaks about the benefits his marketing team has experienced using Wrike Resource for team workload management: “Wrike Resource helped control the otherwise overwhelming nature of our marketing team’s work by allowing us to identify and correct overtaxed employee workloads, reducing the average number of active projects per employee from 12 down to three.” Torsten Mühlhoff, Marketing Controlling & Corporate Projects at ABUS, speaks to the value of Wrike’s security features: "It’s easy to assume that an on-premise solution would be more secure than the cloud. However, our provider and its partners are much better equipped to guarantee the security we need. We’ve also reduced our admin workload and made life easier for our own IT....Wrike is one of the most secure collaborative work management platforms out there, and we really feel we’re in the right hands." Select the best CWM solution for your team This article series isn’t an exhaustive list of pain points that hyper-growth and enterprise teams experience and how a CWM solution can be the answer. As you evaluate vendors, what is exhausting is comparing features head-to-head and reading reviews. Get your free copy of our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them, which highlights the 16 most important CWM features to answer the most common pain points. Try out Wrike today and see why 20,000+ customers rely on our collaborative work management platform to streamline their workflows, get work done faster, and scale.

Wrike Tips 7 min read

Team Collaboration Tools: Why Wrike’s Features Are Essential for Team Success

Just because more teams are dispersed now than pre-pandemic doesn’t mean work is slowing down. If anything, the pace of work for many teams remains the same or even sped up. More work can translate to more available resources and it’s not always in-house. Freelancers and agencies remain valued team members and can’t be forgotten since they’re relied upon to get work done. Keeping everyone inside and outside your organization up to speed on work proves to be more challenging as workloads increase and more team members get integrated into your workflow. That leads us to the next pain points in our series. Pain: Work visibility is too limited Teams need to have an overview of all their projects and be able to share work views with external stakeholders securely. When all stakeholders can’t see project progress at a glance, they risk missing updates and deadlines. As timelines change, all dependencies should dynamically change as well. You don’t want to spend time updating related work just because one item changed. There’s technology to assist with that — team collaboration tools are essential to helping your team clarify their work. Having a high-level calendar view of all your team’s work is necessary to see every project in progress. However, that’s not sufficient since individual tasks and projects need to be monitored at the micro-level, too, especially when multiple departments are tracking the projects in the context of their own unique workflows and reporting. Therefore, having a system to label work for multiple teams without duplicating efforts would make everyone happy. Pain: Reporting isn’t simplified and requires experts In a few clicks, can your team collaboration tools determine how many of your projects are new, in progress, under review, completed, overdue, and canceled? Can you identify any bottlenecks and resolve issues so that more of your team’s work avoids being delayed? If you answered “no” to either question, it’s time to reevaluate your reporting process. You need deep visibility and insight to ensure your team’s best results. But not all reports have the power to give you adequate insight, but the bigger problem is, not everyone has access to separate BI tools. Or maybe you rely on a business analyst to pull and analyze the results. Either way, collecting and interpreting the data on a weekly or monthly basis is a drag. Not only does your reporting process need to provide the necessary insight, but the reports should be visual with options like pivot tables, calendar heatmaps, pie charts, and bar charts so that you can understand the results. Furthermore, reporting dashboards should be interactive that get updated dynamically, and be customizable to how you work so that you can focus more of your time on producing results. Solving each pain with Wrike Wrike’s shared team calendars allow everyone to visualize priorities. When work is automatically synced to a shared calendar, it’s easier to see deadlines and future work coming soon. Calendars in Wrike’s online collaboration tool are customizable to match team needs, like the beginning of your fiscal year, or viewable by day, week, quarter, and year for a detailed snapshot of your team’s progress. Expand or collapse selected layers to get an overview of department, team, and individual workloads while spotting any potential bottlenecks and adjusting deadlines as needed. At the micro-level, Wrike’s cross-tagging capabilities increase transparency among all teams and open up the visibility of your work so that everyone involved can track progress. It’s not limited to tasks, either. Subtasks, folders, milestones, phases, and entire projects can be cross-categorized into multiple work streams. For example, to cross-tag a folder, navigate to the Space that has the folder you want to tag, and then follow these steps: In List view, use the folder icon in the top right to open the info panel. The folder's tags are listed under the title. Click + to add a tag and search for your desired folder in the dropdown list. To remove a tag, click the “x” next to the tag you’d like to remove. Cross-tagging benefits a wide variety of teams and individuals. Whether you’re part of a marketing team looking to open up visibility to others, doing daily standups to report on work in progress, or a Project Manager in a PMO ensuring that all work gets done on time, tagging your work makes it more accessible to those who need it. This functionality has proven to be a game-changer for customers and although competitors have cross-tagging abilities, their functionality is extremely limited to the task level. To track project progress, Wrike Analyze gives your team visibility and business intelligence without requiring access to a separate BI tool. Through our online collaboration tool, you can build customizable reports based on your use cases and choose from a range of visuals to convey the results. Any dashboard you build will update dynamically so you can get a snapshot of how your team is performing and where you’re experiencing bottlenecks. Topgolf relies on Wrike calendars and reports Meredith Selden, Senior Marketing Project Manager at Topgolf gives her thoughts on Wrike calendars and reporting: “Wrike is best for complex cross-functional projects where customizable calendars, dashboards, and reports are needed to automatically roll-up (to) projects and results in data... Applicable to any department and both waterfall and Agile methodology.” Alex Bacon, Assistant Communications Manager at Moneytree experienced the power of cross-tagging in Wrike: “...Through Wrike’s platform, we were able to create and deploy a new section on the blog in 2.5 days, complete with content. Wrike kept everything organized and transparent, so it was always very easy to see the status of the different elements and because of the tagging feature we were able to keep things moving very quickly...” Improve transparency and share work securely Increased workloads doesn’t mean that tracking work and transparency have to take a back seat. A team collaboration tool must be able to scale at your team’s pace and workload. Anything else is unsatisfactory. Download our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them to learn the 16 most important components of a CWM solution. Then, try out Wrike’s online collaboration tool to see why 20,000 customers rely on our platform to get work done faster, share their work securely, and keep team members updated on project progress.

Wrike Tips 7 min read

2 CWM Must-Haves: Enhanced Collaboration & Speedy Asset Approvals

For teams to work faster and deliver positive bottom-line results, two key conditions need to be met. First, teams need to be able to communicate asynchronously. Without an easy-to-use and mandated communication method, a team’s ability to collaborate effectively takes a hit. (One of the biggest productivity killers is time spent searching Slack, email, and more for the latest updates.) Second, everyone must be using the same collaborative work management platform to provide the feedback and grant the approvals that move work forward. Lacking one, or both, leads to slower progress, fractured teams, and reduced productivity. In part one of our “selecting the best CWM solution” series, we examined the four major pain points that modern hypergrowth businesses and enterprises face: A lack of process makes accepting and assigning work requests difficult. Managing a team’s work in spreadsheets is time-consuming and inefficient. Working without project tracking (visibility) into project progress means teams are siloed. Working out of multiple tools prevents teams from staying on the same page. In part two, we’ll focus on teams working together and fast-tracking approvals. Pain: More tools isn’t the answer As it goes at many companies, some technologies, like Slack, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, and email, are used by everyone. Then there’s the siloed software used only by specific teams with access. For example, the product team works out of Atlassian and Miro. Meanwhile, the creative team uses Adobe and Figma to collaborate. Customer success uses Totango, Accelo, or ChurnZero to keep tabs on accounts, monitor churn, and look for upsell opportunities. With all these disconnected tools and limited team access, how do you provide visibility across teams to share files, tasks, reports, and project progress? It gets murky when you don’t have a single solution that everyone has access to for project updates, asset approval and management, and shared team calendars. Of course, one method to extend visibility is the @mention to get their attention and spark a conversation. Collaborative work management tools should include the @mention functionality by default but that’s only setting the stage for how teammates and stakeholders should be collaborating. File sharing and providing feedback on HTML and design assets are also important components because these features allow everyone to collaborate in the same interface. When your chosen software doesn’t allow you to do either one, you’re forced to work out of multiple platforms and critical feedback could be lost in translation. Pain: Design asset approval takes too long Marketing campaigns don’t go live until all assets are finalized, and just one unapproved asset can delay an entire campaign. When multiple assets live in disparate locations, keeping track of everything can be overwhelming. The result is a lengthy approval process when multiple stakeholders need to sign off and not everyone has access to all your tools. Approvers must be able to access the same software and communicate in real time. Even better if everyone can compare version histories to see what’s new. With design feedback, having the ability to pinpoint specific areas with edits is ideal instead of drafting screenshot mockups. Furthermore, your CWM should have established workflows where you can automatically move assets (and projects) to the next person and stage in production. Collaboration is in Wrike’s DNA The @mention functionality is an easy way to draw someone's attention to a high-priority conversation or message. Whereas some collaborative work management tools allow its users to @mention colleagues in limited areas, others don’t support project- or folder-level collaboration. Hypergrowth and enterprise teams need more. Wrike has the @mention, of course, and what’s great is that conversations are streamlined at the folder, project, task, and subtask levels. Descriptions are organized above conversation threads and support multi-user live editing. In addition to conversations, teams may have files in separate places that other stakeholders will need to collaborate on for projects. Wrike’s file sharing and uploading capabilities accepts files from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Microsoft One Drive, SharePoint, YouTube, and website links, along with digital asset management providers MediaValet and Bynder. Pretty much any file source you have, Wrike can upload. Launch campaigns on time with speedy asset approval Now that you’ve uploaded your file, your team needs to work together to finalize the asset. Wrike’s proofing capabilities boost team productivity and creative output because you can visually mark up and compare images, videos, PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints, and HTML web content for easy edits and fast approvals. Highlight text, click images, or select time markers to leave clear, contextual comments. Reply to and discuss feedback inline, and resolve comments as edits are made. As a bonus, you can access the functionality inside Adobe® Creative Cloud® applications to view feedback and make changes without switching tabs or tools. You can also invite external reviewers if they’re outside your organization, and it’s all secure with password protection: Aerotek speeds up asset approvals with Wrike Aerotek eliminated weeks from their planning time by using Wrike, and Matt Andrews, Marketing Campaign Manager, loves the proofing capabilities: “Having the ability to critique work, mark it up within the tool, and have it go directly back to the team saves us a lot of time… “There’s no functionality for mark up in email. Now we’re able to skip some meetings and do everything in-line while capturing the history of all the comments and revisions.” Experience the Wrike difference Evaluating CWM software is more than just reading customer reviews and comparing functionality on a pricing page. It’s not a decision to take lightly — your team’s work depends on having a solution that enables them to work their way. Download our new eBook, Empowering Teams With CWM: 13 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them to learn the top 16 most important CWM features for hypergrowth and enterprise teams. Whether your team is fully remote, hybrid, or returning to office full-time, you can always collaborate better and approve work faster. Let Wrike show you how by starting a free trial today.

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New eBook: 16 Reasons Why Finance & Legal Teams Use Wrike

16 reasons why organizations should choose Wrike’s CWM for finance and legal teams

Wrike features that apply to all finance and legal teams

Get all 16 use cases here

Brandon Weaver

Related articles

Why Your CWM Must Have BI Reporting Tools and Workload Management Built-In

Team Collaboration Tools: Why Wrike’s Features Are Essential for Team Success

2 CWM Must-Haves: Enhanced Collaboration & Speedy Asset Approvals

New eBook: 16 Reasons Why Finance & Legal Teams Use Wrike

16 reasons why organizations should choose Wrike’s CWM for finance and legal teams

Wrike features that apply to all finance and legal teams

Get all 16 use cases here

Brandon Weaver

Related articles

Why Your CWM Must Have BI Reporting Tools and Workload Management Built-In

Team Collaboration Tools: Why Wrike’s Features Are Essential for Team Success

2 CWM Must-Haves: Enhanced Collaboration & Speedy Asset Approvals

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