Trello

As a small business owner, you likely have challenges with managing multiple projects and ensuring your operations run smoothly. The website creation? The inventory upgrade? The new product? You have to keep up with multiple projects simultaneously.

Project management tools like Trello help you monitor projects and ensure they stay on schedule. This guide will explore why small businesses choose Trello and how to use it to manage projects effectively.

You can view the full pricing details on Trello’s website.

Here are some of the best use cases for Trello:

Brainstorming with teams

Trello provides organization-wide boards in which all team members can post ideas and ideate together. Users can comment on each other’s ideas, brainstorming viable solutions to business challenges.

Setting deadlines and schedules

You can create an organization-wide calendar with Trello. You'll set project deadlines and work schedules, and every employee can see when they’re required to complete projects. Users can indicate their task progress, i.e., “Done,” “Review,” “To Do,” etc. This feature can help streamline small business workflows.

Project monitoring

As an administrator, you can monitor the progress of all projects from your dashboard. Whether tracking a simple "To-Do, In Progress, Done" workflow or a more complex one, you’ll monitor everything from your Trello admin dashboard. Trello uses colors to differentiate tasks in various progress stages, making them easy for admins to track.

Task management

You can assign tasks to specific team members on Trello and set due dates. You'll use high, medium, or low labels to prioritize tasks and ensure your employees know what to focus on. You can also create custom labels for tasks, making it easy to identify and monitor them later.

Affordability

Your small business may have exhausted its software budget and have no room for another subscription starting at $5 per month for every employee. In that case, you can choose a free alternative like Taiga that supports unlimited projects and users. Another suitable option is ClickUp, which offers unlimited tasks and users on its free plan. However, these free alternatives aren’t as user-friendly as Trello.

Free or discounted bundles

Your small business might already be subscribed to a tool that offers complementary project management features. For example, if you already use ClickUp to manage documents and customer relationships, adopting the built-in project management features is logical instead of paying extra for Trello. 

Reducing external integrations

Trello offers helpful project management features but relies on external integrations for many things, ranging from time tracking to showing task dependencies, company-wide polls, and advanced search. Some integrations require payment, further stretching your software budget. You may want to choose an alternative like Wrike and Plaky to reduce your dependency on external integrations.

Registration

Head to Trello.com on your web browser or download the mobile app. Enter your email address and hit the Sign up button. Alternatively, you can register with a Slack account if your business has one.

If you register with a new email address, Trello will send a verification code. Enter this code, and you’ll be asked for your full name and a unique password for your account. After completing the registration process, you’ll be redirected to your Trello dashboard.

Create a board

The first prompt for new Trello users is to create a board. The board houses your projects, telling you at a glance what's being worked on, which employees are working on what, and the progress of existing projects. It's akin to a whiteboard filled with sticky notes; each note is a task you've set for your team. You can choose any name for your board.

After creating a board, you'll create lists for it. A list is a bundle of cards representing project milestones, e.g., "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done." The idea is to sort tasks into these lists to enable you to track their progress. 

Inviting team members

To involve your full team in projects, each employee will need a Trello account. Click the “+” button next to Members on the left menu, and a box will appear. Type the email addresses of the employees you want to invite to your Trello workspace. Alternatively, create an invite link and share it with all employees.

Add a task

Cards represent tasks on a Trello dashboard. Click the "Add a card" button to create a new task. Click on the card you’ve created to add details, including a description, due dates, file attachments, labels, checklists, and more.

After creating a task and adding details, you can assign it to another team member, who will receive a notification about it. When the team member completes the task, they move the card from one list to another, e.g., from “To Do” to “Done,” and you’ll be notified once this happens.

Trello fosters effective communication. It informs every team member of their assigned tasks and alerts managers when tasks have been completed. Team members can comment and tag each other to ask questions. Trello can be especially valuable for remote teams, keeping employees in sync despite physical distance.

Workspace views

As an admin, you can view your small business workspace in different formats: Table, Calendar, Timeline, Dashboard, and Map. With the Calendar view, you can scroll to any date and see what tasks are due that day and how they’ve progressed. The Timeline view shows all tasks in a chronological sequence across a line, enabling you to refer to any task in the past or future.

Map view lets you see all tasks on a map, a crucial feature for businesses with workforces distributed worldwide. These viewing formats help you track and understand tasks better, ensuring no important work is ignored.

Thanks to its advanced integrations, migrating to Trello is easy. You can use a Power-Up to migrate data directly from another project management tool to Trello.

For example, using the Blue Cat Power-Up, you can import cards from CSV spreadsheets into your Trello board. You’ll download the card details in CSV format from your existing tool, then upload the file for Trello to extract the information. To prevent discrepancies, you'll choose how to map your spreadsheet data into Trello before uploading the file.

Trello has a broad range of integrations called Power-Ups. These Power-Ups provide extra functionality that helps your small business manage projects better. There are hundreds of integrations, including those you’ll hardly find on rival project management platforms.

An excellent example of a Power-Up is Clockify, a time-tracking tool. With this tool, employees can indicate the time they spend on each task, and you’ll use this information for remuneration or to bill clients. For example, if you run a small social media agency, employees can indicate the number of hours they spend on a client’s project, and you’ll use this information to bill the client accordingly. As an administrator, you can select any employee’s profile and view the number of hours they’ve worked (and on what tasks) over a specific period.

Another example is Slack, a widely used business communication tool. With this integration, you can send a Trello card with relevant information directly to a team member in Slack. You can set reminders for Trello cards in Slack, and the Slackbot will remind you about the task at the set time. Similarly, you can set reminders for other employees in your team to ensure that they don’t forget vital tasks and details.

Trello integrates with Freshdesk, a popular customer support platform for small businesses. This integration lets you convert Freshdesk support tickets directly into Trello tasks and assign them to someone. Then, you can track the status of any Trello card linked to a Freshdesk ticket, ensuring your support staff handles customer complaints.

You can view the full list of integrations on Trello’s website.

Though it has a broad integrations library, Trello isn’t integrated with some prominent business software tools. Even when it’s integrated with a tool, it might not deliver all your desired functionality for that tool.

Suppose you want every employee to get a daily Slack message about their distinct Trello tasks (cards). You can’t do this with the built-in Slack Power-Up. However, you can build a custom integration with Zapier, a third-party platform that connects Trello to thousands of business applications.

A common complaint is Trello’s lack of integration with Dropbox, a popular cloud storage tool for small businesses. However, Zapier offers a Trello-Dropbox integration that solves this problem.