Creative Talk with Roll

Are you a freelancer or creative agency - working on a variety of projects?  Need to keep your life in order and better manage your jobs and workflow while getting more visibility of how you’re tracking?  Have a look at Roll.

What are the real benefits of using Roll for freelancers and creative agencies?

In many ways freelancers and agencies are very similar. They all need a simple and fast way to manage their business and work. From managing the sales pipeline to managing projects and invoicing to getting full visibility of business performance to make smarter business decisions.

Many creative businesses and freelancers either use manual spreadsheets and pen & paper or rely on multiple disconnected tools and apps to manage contacts and leads, track time, schedule tasks and send invoices. With Roll you have all of that in one place. The real benefit of that is the overall visibility and insights it gives you. By having everything in one place you always know how your business is performing, how much money you're looking at invoicing, how much work you have on, where it comes from and what you should be focused on.

And there is a free version of Roll specifically for one-man-bands so that’s definitely an additional benefit for freelancers.

Does Roll work with / integrate in to other SaaS systems?

One of our main goals is to reduce the need for multiple individual tools and integrations. We know from our own experience, running a creative business, how hard it is to manage your business and work when key information is scattered across different tools and systems. And often it’s difficult to truly integrate different systems with each other. So a big driver behind Roll is about having all the essential information about your business and projects in one, easily accessible place - without needing integrations. But having said that, we do currently integrate with Xero and will most likely add other accounting systems in the future as we consider that essential for our larger clients who need more complex accounting systems to run their business.

Your philosophy is to keep “everything simple” – is this really the case - is it really that easy to use?

Absolutely! We frequently hear from users that Roll is one of the easiest and most intuitive software tools they’ve ever used. We work really hard to keep Roll as simple as possible, however we don't confuse simplicity for lack of functionality. We also understand that our users need a range of features and functionality to really get value out of Roll. Therefore, we aim to build a lot of complexity behind the scenes that means as a user you can perform quite complex and comprehensive tasks without a lot of work. A perfect example of this is our "invoice all unbilled time" button. One click can generate an invoice of your entire project's work that's ready for sending.

Is this product made for a single user or a team? Does it perform better for one than the other?

Roll is very much designed to work for both freelancers and teams. We have a range of users who are one-man-bands and just use it for themselves and we also have larger agencies where the whole team is using Roll every day. Some of our users even give contractors and key clients access to Roll. We have three different user types; Admin, Employee and Contractor. They each have different access rights, giving the business owner full control over who can see what.

Are you specifically targeting the creative community with Roll, or can it integrate into any company?

We are from the creative community. We started developing Roll as a solution to the challenges we had running our own Creative Agency in Auckland, 96Black. So we feel very closely connected to the creative community and the challenges businesses and freelancers in this space face. That’s why we think we’re in an ideal position to develop a product for this audience, we know the pain, we've felt it ourselves. But Roll can definitely also be extremely valuable for other service based businesses. We are actually seeing quite a lot of interest from Architects at the moment as well as Interior Designers and consultancy firms. And there are other segments we want to target in the future. But right now our focus is on the creative community.

Do you have any future roll out editions to this product coming up in the near future?

Absolutely. We’re constantly working to improve the product and release new features. Just last month we launched our new Invoicing feature as well as more time tracking functionality. The next big thing is quoting. We’re expecting this to be rolled out a bit later this month.

Describe your product in 30 words and why we should consider it.

Roll is everything you need to manage your business and projects - In one simple tool. Stop relying on manual spreadsheets or scattered tools. Managing your business has never been easier.

Try Roll for free now – www.rollhq.com