What's possible in ClickUp: from EOS to OOO management to client portals

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Hello everyone and welcome to the Zen Pilot live show. So good to see you here with us today, whether you're watching live or whether you're watching the recording. Yes, this is being recorded if you want to know. We appreciate you all the same, but special kudos to the ones joining us live because you'll get to ask your questions too. Alex Rizzia, our solutions lead here at Zenpilot. Alex, how are you doing today?

Hey Kubam, Great. It's been an amazing day so far with a lot of good work being done and I'm happy to take a break from work to talk about a lot of the stuff that I'm actually doing. So this will be nice for a change.

Yeah, yeah, I love that we already have comments rolling in. Usually I ask people to let us know if they can hear us and see us. Our very own Maggie Kernarans is saying loud and clear, hi guys. Ready for her mind to be blown. Awesome. And Rashmi here saying hello Maggie. So already in the comments we've got quite a nice party going on. This is awesome. Alex. People are going to be joining in for a few moments more. So I wanted to ask you with a topic today that actually I'm extremely excited about. What is possible in ClickUp, some advanced use cases that we're going to cover here today. Also, taking into account what the chat is going to give us and ask us about, I wanted to ask you, while we give people just a couple more minutes to join in, who do you hope is tuning in today? Like what kind of person and what kind of situation will benefit the most from listening to this conversation?

What a very first question. Well, for the most of it it will be people in charge of operations, the that want to find the best way to manage their internal processes and how they can do something better, how they can improve and find the missing gap in their workflow that can take their delivery to the next level. So could be operation managers, could be agency owners, could be project managers. So I think a lot of people could benefit from this.

Okay, awesome. The comments are really rolling in. Jackson is saying he's hearing us. Great. Excited to get started. Awesome. This we've got from somebody, Mark Lichten, the user. I feel like that might be Jeff Cipher, but I'm not sure. Alex is a certified ClickUp wizard. Yes, Alex is a ClickUp wizard. Alex, actually, could you share a couple sentences about what you do at Zenpilot, setting the context here?

Yes, absolutely. I'm in charge of the solution side at ZenPilot. Which basically means that the technical work that gets done for clients, so when clients come in for an engagement with us, be it an implementation, implementing ClickUp from scratch in their agency, or adopting a new method of using ClickUp, or going for a particular project with us, like maybe they want to add.

A.

Specific add on or system in their ClickUp instance, I'm usually the person that the coordinates the work so the clients get what they expect. And also handling custom solutions, when people want something that they don't know exactly what it is, how it will look like, I'm there in the discussion trying to figure out if that can be done, how we can do it and lay out the path forward so we can get to the client's desired results. But also for our internal ClickUp work, as in Pilot, like developing our own lookup instance, because that's where a lot of people think lose when they think, oh, our ClickUp is at its best level, we can't improve it anymore. So even us, as in Pilot, which we are a PM experts, we still have the things to improve all the time in our ClickUp instance. And I love taking some of that and implementing the best options for us internally as well.

Yeah, exactly. The journey of continuous improvement is never ending, always exciting. I mean, this is a moment for me because when I joined Zenpilot, I mean, I was a ClickUp user before Zenpilot. That's kind of how I got here. And I was excited by some of the things that were possible. I remember the first aha moment being like, I can finally take the same tasks and display them as a board and as a list. I don't have to choose between one or the other. That was way back in, I think 2018 or something. But, but like joining Zenpilot and seeing what can be done, like you saw what I put in the event title here, folks, like EOS management, out of office management, client portals, these are all things that are possible in ClickUp. And we'll be talking about a little bit about like how these things are put together, what are the pros and cons, et cetera. And just diving a little bit deeper into that. But before all of this, I wanted to ask you. Oh, okay. Oh, I want to highlight that. That's so nice. Mary is saying, hey Maggie, kudos for zenpilot team hosting these informative sessions. That warms my heart. Thank you so much, Mary, for saying that. Yeah, I think this is number four already. We had Maggie, Jeff, Kevin and now Alex in quite a short time. If you want to Check out our previous sessions. You can check out our LinkedIn events on the ZenPilot LinkedIn company page or, or go to YouTube and look up ZenPilot. But don't do that now. If you're live, let's get into the session today where you can ask your questions. We won't have a Q and A at the end, by the way, so just ask your questions kind of as we go along and we'll get to them as we go. Excellent. Hey, Kristen. Shout out to Kristen. Show us your ways. Alex, thanks so much for joining us today. Okay, yeah. So Alex, before we dive into the main topic today, there's a question that I ask every guest on the Zen pilot live show and you will be no exception. Alex, what is your number one tip for agency operators?

Very simple one, make sure your team is tracking time, guys, measure that, measure your utilization and you'll find out where we're actually at. If you solve this, you'll solve a lot of other problems. And it's an easy thing to get into, hard thing to master the. But definitely, if you have, if you don't time track time yet, start doing it, your life will change.

That's awesome. That's a very specific tip. I would like to get just one step more specific about it then. If you're saying time tracking is the most important thing, can you talk about one or two biggest mistakes that agencies or just companies in general do when it comes to time tracking?

Sure thing. The most obvious one is they don't time track at all. And what does that cost? You don't have any insight into your team utilization. You definitely hire them for 160 hours per month, 90 hours per month, who knows? And who knows how much they're actually working? Can they get more work? Can they get less work? You don't have a measuring of that. And without that you can't find out if you can take on more client work, more client projects, get more deals coming through, you might do that and you might overload your team and then you won't be able to deliver your projects on time. Clients will be unhappy, they'll turn and you won't know why. So that's the biggest problem when you're not time tracking. And once you start time tracking, yes, there are a lot of small mistakes that you can do like tracking time and allocating that against the wrong thing or doing it against the black hole because technically you can't track time against nothing. And that's. It doesn't really show you much data Utilization. Yes, it still shows you that, but it doesn't show you time spent per client, for example. So getting into the habits of tracking time correctly, first just tracking time at all, no matter what, then tracking time against the client, then against a particular project, then against a particular deliverable in the project until it gets to the level of tracking time against the step in the process. So you can measure correctly your estimates versus actual. Like that's the level people should aim to get to so you can understand. Okay, is my process configured correctly? It says it should take me one hour. Oh, it took me two hours. Maybe I should review my process so that's the level people want to get to.

Awesome. Awesome. Wow. Thank you so much for the additional detail here. I think that's actually very actionable and it's good to have a gauge of like the level that agencies should be aiming for here. Awesome. Very well then, I wanted to ask you. We're going to be talking about these specific advanced use cases in ClickUp, but before that, a little bit of a lighter question. Can you tell me, Alex, about what is your favorite project you've ever done in ClickUp, whether it was for clients or internally?

That's a hard question. I like projects for a lot of different reasons. Can be for their complexity, can be for, I know just the awesome client that's getting it can be the goal for it. But if I were to say it's probably an internal project, actually one that's still undergoing, which is our project for refining our delivery method. How do we improve our ClickUp game for our clients? How do we improve our baseline delivery service? Like how the ClickUp configuration looks like, having multiple versions of that, that's something we're doing right now. That's both a very good challenge, but also very exciting one because instead of having one option that's amazing, we are working to get free options that are amazing. So it's definitely an interesting project, which is, well, one in the works. And it has been very intensive from a lot of standpoints. Both building the thing, thinking it out, building it, getting the training behind it. There's a lot of things when you're changing, I know you're launching your 2.0, your 3.0 in this case. People love hearing about 3.0 launching this time of the year.

Yeah. Okay, well, can you say a little bit more about this project? Like why in particular, what is the part of it that makes you the most excited?

Basically because it makes us look at how project management can be done in ClickUp from These various levels of doing it. So I've mentioned earlier, tracking time against nothing, just check your time. Then against a client contract, the deliverable, it's pretty much the same thing, but it's about the overall hierarchy of things and where your actionable work lives in. So we're talking about getting a version where it's pretty much the client contract is all that matters and there is minimal PM going on and everything revolves around the client contract and getting the visibility into the financial information, but keeping it very simple. Because some people, I mean, let's face it, people are very different. Some of them want something very, very, very simple for their agency, some of them want something that gives them some data, some people want something more complex. And then there are the people that want the best out of what ClickUp can offer you. So that's what I'm talking about. Getting the simplest level, then getting a slightly higher level, having just the deliverable, like imagine ClickUp with no subtasks. Can that work? So far we've said that ClickUp without subtasks can't work. Well, guess what, with the right approach, that can work as well, depending on your desired results and then also approaching the same thing, but with subtasks, those steps, measuring your steps and the final level being, okay, we've done all of this for the next level, especially if you're a very product oriented company using Sprints, Scrum, Agile in that case. So how can that transform your project management even further? So these are the challenges we're working on right now, all very exciting ones, making us do what we do best, but in different experience levels. So do you want an easy, medium, hard or master mode? That's pretty much what we're working on right now and that involves building things, training, materials, dashboards, a lot of stuff, automations, a lot of things.

You put it very well there, Alex. And this is a story that I've seen unfold since I joined zenpilot and I joined not that long ago, in March, really full time at the moment. When I joined, this wasn't really a thing. There was one Zen pilot way zenpilot methodology at a certain level, fairly high level of complexity, but that also gives you a lot of visibility. What's happening here now, from what I'm hearing from the work of the delivery team is there's now more of a range of okay, you can go simpler, less visibility, less robust reporting, but it'll be a little bit easier to wrap your head around. And when you're ready for the next level, you can go into that. That's awesome. That's so nice that you mentioned that. And I'm always happy to hear about what people are excited about at Zenpilot and just in general, I love to ask that question. So thanks. Very well. Alex, if you're ready, I think the watchers and listeners would love to hear about some of these specific use cases. Now would be a good time. If you've got questions for the Q and A, throw them in at an opportunity moment tonight. Pronounced that right. At the right moment we'll address your questions. By the way, shout out to Kevin Hawthorne. He's saying hot weather in Florida this summer, ready for October. Kevin has been a regular, I think, ever since we started doing these things, always coming in with Good afternoon from Lakeland, Florida. Kevin, thank you so much for joining us again here today. Okay, so first use case we want to cover here, talk a little bit about how it's done, how it might be done, what are the pitfalls, et cetera. What I picked is the client portal. And here's a question that we get quite often with regards to ClickUp being an interface for working with clients. Is it possible to share tasks with your clients, but without including key data such as maybe you don't want them to see subtasks, maybe you don't want them to see comments, maybe you don't want them necessarily to see precisely the time track? You want to give them a level of visibility into stuff that you can control so well, that's the subject of the whole livestream today. Is. Is it possible? Alex, tell us about that.

Well, yeah, that's a great one and can be very tricky indeed. There are ways to tackle this. Now personally, I think there are good ways and there are less good ways to tackle this because some of them can be very manual. Can this be achieved? Yes. I mean, if you really go manual about it, you can totally achieve this. Is it scalable by any means?

No.

And it puts a lot of manual work on your team and they'll get frustrated by that. You don't want to hear about that. So what's the best solution here? Because in reality, ClickUp doesn't allow yet the level of permissions and sharing to share only the stuff that you want with certain users or guests. You have limited options with what you can show to them. There's the thing that, yes, you can just invite them over to a dashboard and just build a view only dashboard which they can't edit. What's the problem with that? Because if they need to see the dashboard and the data inside it. They need to have access to the data that feeds the dashboard. Then you haven't solved anything. You still haven't given them access to your client tasks with all of the stuff, they can dig into that if they want, as it will be there. So it's very tricky to get the level of permission that you want with no additional functionalities. And this is where the solution I love comes in, where it's not only ClickUp, because ClickUp by itself can do this the way people often want to. So the way to go here is by leveraging make integrations, for example. That way what we love doing is you have your client services space, whatever it is, and you don't bring clients there. No, that stays the stays internally. Only your team sees that for your clients. However, you can create a separate space which can have a similar hierarchy structure, but probably you can take it a notch down. So if you have a client or you have a folder for every client in your client services space, you might not need to do that. You could do maybe one folder for every account manager or every type of project and get clients as a simple list inside there. And using make, you can do something very cool. You can set up some key triggers in ClickUp and you can choose okay when any task is created or when I manually tick this checkbox that says sent to the client. You can have make create probably an identical task in that satellite client space where clients will get invited in their own list and the same task would exist there but not add to list. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about create an exact task like the one you have, but taking out what you don't want the client to see. So for example, you don't want subtask. Cool. You're just going to create a parent task with what that has rolled up to it you want. Because if you want to share with them time estimates, time tracked, and if you set those at the subtest level, no problem, you can use the roll up at the parent task and share with the client that you can also choose to leave out things like the assignee that works there or any custom field that's weird or tags, because tags can be quite messy and you don't want clients to see all of those tags and especially comments. That's not a big one. So you can try pretty much pick and choose what you want the client to see what you don't want the client to see that way. And it can pretty much be a fully automated workflow because if you're using webhooks with make and you get the right triggers in ClickUp to call those webhooks, then you can choose, okay, I want this to happen in these particular cases. You can control how you want this to work. And again, updating these tasks is done in a similar way. When you're updating a due date or you're changing a custom field or time estimate or time is being tracked, you can have the same task updating real time. So it's not a manual process. Process doesn't take one hour for it to update. The automation does it for you. And the client sees exactly what you want them to see. The tasks are also linked between them. So if you want to jump between the client task, where your client communication is going on, and jump straight back to your real task to talk with your team about what the client said, you can definitely do that. So it's very easy to bounce between these tasks. It's not a manual burden of, okay, let me search for the client task. Oh, let me search for the real task. So it's very easy and at hand. And that's been a great solution. And you can go quite crazy with this. This is the baseline. You can go next with setting up a client request form. You can even build dashboards with them because now you have data that you can share with them. So you can build them something more visual, get them a dashboard with pie charts, bar charts, time reporting. You can do what you want. Now that you have the data there, you can share with clients without them seeing something weird and go crazy with it, basically.

Okay, so the blocker seems to be trying to wrap my head around this. The blocker seems to be, you can't build a dashboard if kind of the person viewing the dashboard can't see the tasks. But if you have those twin tasks and they see those twin tasks that can feed into the dashboard. And from what you're saying, make gives a lot of control over what you pass on to the client and what you don't. That's awesome. And I'm curious about just one detail here. Forgive me. So is it as simple as, or could it be as simple as you've got your internal task? Let's say you want to have full control over when something gets pushed to the client, there's a checkbox pushed to the client, then it kind of runs the routine of updating the twin task and does it uncheck the box so you can then kind of run it again?

So for example, you'd have the checkbox to choose which tasks should be created in the first place. And once it's created, you basically want it to be there. So the update can be made from a separate trigger. Like you update the due dates, the time is being tracked, you update the custom field, and you don't need to check the box for any further updates, unless you only want the thing to update at your specific notice. So you can use a checkbox. You can also use tags for this. For example, the way I've set it up very recently for client that I've actually presented this to today, it's very funny that we're talking about this today as well. So we force an update by getting a tag in the task which says send to client. And you place the tag, the update is forced or the task is being created. When you do that, you might. Oh, do I need to remove the tag? No, the ClickUp automation, after it applies the tag, it calls the webhook. Boom. It removes the tag so you don't see it anymore. So it can be pretty nifty.

Yeah, that is very nifty. Okay, so that gives me a great picture of how it looks from kind of the perspective of the agency that's running on ClickUp. Can you say a few words about what this looks like from the perspective of the client? Is there anything kind of to watch out for or do they just interface with this like a regular ClickUp setup?

For the most of it, they interact with it normally. Like with any ClickUp setup. The only thing that's the only thing that you might want to do extra is go into your custom field settings and choose to hide some custom fields. So they just don't see the options that at all showing up over there. Besides this, you control the permissions via the automation pretty much. So you just need to get a documentation for teaching your clients. Okay, this is how we'll collaborate. You'll have this location to see all of your open work, which is a view. You can have this location for all of your clothes work. Another view. You can also share with them a doc with all of the resources. You can have a chat view to talk with them. You can get custom embeds. Oh, you offer the client some external reports via Looker Studio. Maybe you're doing something with the monitoring analytics for them. You can embed dashboard over there for them to see and you can share with them whatever you want over there in that simple client list. And you can get a lot. You can be very creative with what you're getting over there.

And what kind of account do the clients need to have here? I mean, I got super curious about the nitty gritty here, watchers and listeners. If you have any questions of your own, by all means drop them in, we'll prioritize them. But just two more questions here before we move on to the next use case. I suppose one being so in that setup, do the clients become guests in your workspace?

Yes.

Or do they have to have full.

Account become external guests which have comment permissions. So obviously you want them to comment on tasks, but you don't want them to change anything else on task. Don't want them changing due dates or statuses. So if you have them only on comment only permissions, you can talk with them, they can see stuff, but they can't edit anything else, which is exactly what most people want.

Okay, and my second question. There is a question coming in actually. Okay, I said I'm going to prioritize incoming questions. Let's try this one. LinkedIn user. Sorry, can't identify right off the bat. I'll look it up in a second as Alex is responding says I hear teams tell me they spend a ton of time updating clients. Any idea how much time we're saving teams with dashboards? Well, Alex, what would be your response here?

Not exactly sure. Dashboards for what in particular? That depends on what does updating clients mean? Updating task data for client or something else. Dashboards usually help, so you don't need to manually send the same stuff over again. But it really depends a lot on what you're trying to achieve. Maybe the LinkedIn user could share a bit more. I can provide a better answer. Unfortunately I can't really get something better just by looking at this.

We'll revisit this one then if we get more detail in here. Thank you so much for asking the question either way. So here's something that you said that I think some people might be curious about. You mentioned chat, right? And a debate that's been going on. I mean I've run or attended quite a few of these events even in my short tenure at Zenpilot. And this keeps popping up. ClickUp versus Slack. I wanted you to talk a little bit about kind of not the ClickUp Slack integration per se, but there's one thing that I've seen that I think would be exciting to talk about is like this mirroring of Slack messages in ClickUp. I don't like. I don't have a good way to describe it, but what I've seen is that there's a way for, or correct me if I'm wrong, for the client to keep using Slack, but it's showing up on the agency side and ClickUp like, I hope you know what I'm referring to here. What are the possibilities there?

Well, obviously the ClickUp chat is. It's a feature inside a very broad platform. Slack is mainly a communication platform, so it's definitely more advanced. So for most people Slack works better, especially for client communication. I think actually the best of both worlds is integrating them to some extent. Can be something simple, can be something more complex. By something simple I don't necessarily mean just the native ClickUp Slack integration, which can be quite underwhelming, but it could be something that's achieved with Zapier or maybe that can allow for a bit more other than this really. You can't get a Slack level experience just with ClickUp unfortunately you can get a similar structure of things like you can use spaces or folders as channels. So if you have a Slack channel for every client and then ClickUp every client is a folder, you're looking it up. You can keep a chat view at every folder and that's your channel for that client work in that case or for themes at a space level. But there's ways to mimic the Slack structure. But you're missing some other functionalities which can be very useful. Also the real time feeling of it is real. Slack is more real time and pops better in your eyes than the chat view which if you don't have ClickUp notifications set up in a very particular way that enables notifications a lot more. So they show up like bubbles over there when it's really important. It really won't work because what uses the chat that you need to manually check to see if there's something new over there. So that's one thing to get into account.

I gotcha. I gotcha. Okay. And you know, upon request we can definitely dig deeper into this. Comments are coming in, we gotta address them. Then let's have a look. Okay. I think this is a two parter. Let's see. Kristen is saying when I think of a client dashboard, I think about more than just tracking the tasks to do's and progress that we want clients to see. That's part one and part two being when I think, oh, that's a bit of a. I think about more than tracking tasks. I think of a singular portal where we can also link to links. They come reference like reports or briefs and maybe even have a feedback form basically all their assets. Thoughts on how to approach this? Paul? That's for you, Alex.

Yeah, definitely. This is pretty much aligned with what I've been talking about where you can get the client inside a particular list, which yes, you can use it for tracking task to do progress. That's one functionality of it. But you can also use the same list and various views to get other important things with them. You can use a doc as a view and that doc can host a lot of things, can host your external reports briefs with them. You can have a page for every meeting brief that you have with them. So you can get a lot of stuff over there. Embeds from other tools, docs, contracts. You can get a lot of things with them just in one ClickUp list and using views. Even without going to dashboards, you can still get a lot of things. Leveraging a few views and a doc. It's crazy what you can do depending on just what you want to achieve. It's really a matter of what do I want to share with clients and work from there. You might not want to share tasks at all with your clients, might want to share only other stuff with your clients. In that case, you might be good with just a dashboard and you don't need to give them access to anything in your workspace. You build a dashboard that's made up of only embed views and some text blocks and you can get a lot of stuff there. You can embed docs over there and use the dashboard for anything that's really not ClickUp. You can use it to centralize anything that you want over there. Yeah.

The embed view, when I first discovered it, I was blown away by it that you can just embed basically anything from any other app and make it visible in ClickUp. That really kind of speaks to the vision of just this one place where work happens. Anyway, Kristen, thank you for the question. Hope that helps answer it. Maggie is saying on the subject of Slack, which we are just about to close off here, but Maggie also added for teams that are accustomed to using Slack channels to discuss projects, they can use the parent task with threads as their new Slack channel. You'll notice this is not a question. Maggie is also part of zenpilot, which is why she's just adding that in. If you're curious or you want to see another way to organize things. All righty. Alex, I wanted next to ask you a little bit more about integrations. I know that you've got also something related to integrations and reporting that you're going to show a little bit later in this stream. First, let's gently ease ourselves into the topic of integrations. You mentioned make. You mentioned Zapier. We talked about the Slack integration. Tell us about kind of some of the examples of integrations that are perhaps more advanced, perhaps your favorite ones, or the ones that save agencies the most time, whichever direction you want to go in here.

Yep, absolutely. So integrations are really the key to making the workflow your own really, because start having your project management think lookup is obviously very important is the start. But sometimes just that is not enough to get your whole workflow, which you might not use ClickUp for anything in your agents. You might need some other tools as well, might want to sync info from other platforms to some ClickUp tasks or some location. And how are we going to do that? Are we going to export stuff manually all the time? We're going to manually copy and paste things where you need them. So this is where integrations come in hand very, very well. Some of the most important ones that I can think about on top of my head relate to HubSpot integrations. And again, I'm not talking the recently launched native ClickUp integration, which for the moment is not as advanced as we'd like it to be. I'm talking about making a proper HubSpot integration with make, most likely not with Zapier, because MAKE is also more robust. That can allow you to carry over deal information to the extent that you want and you can from that point onward. If you start getting your HubSpot stuff into ClickUp at the right moment, you can then make that to bridge the workflow between sales and delivery very well. So when something is closed one in HubSpot, what happens next? Somebody needs to remember to go into ClickUp and create a new folder or get something created over there. That's an example of good integration where you can use triggers from HubSpot and make something happen in ClickUp using templates, using custom locations. That's a very common one that we're seeing. Another big one is what I've said there. With the client area, we're pretty much integrating ClickUp to ClickUp with external integrations. That's another use case where the native ClickUp automations can do things the way you want them to do. You can leverage something like make to have them do exactly what you want. The previous use case is one example, but you might have other things again that you might want to use to bypass certain features that aren't there in the platform yet. I'M seeing people getting very creative about formulas. And if you know about formulas in ClickUp, you know that, oh, they're cool. But you can't really use them for filtering, for grouping by something that's made by formula, or looking at them in dashboards or calculating something using a formula with a formula. You can do that. So another use case is you can use MAKE to transform that formula in a proper custom field that has real data, hard coded data, and then you can do what you want with that data and you can leverage it in views and filters and dashboards and other formulas to find out what you want. And this comes very handy, especially with invoicing with costs like you want to find out costs for how much you should bill this client based on the number of hours tracked for them. You can get a formula to find out that, but you can't get the final formula because you're missing one step. So you can use MAKE to centralize things into one hard code, a custom field, and then you can use that to continue workflow and you can even use that to get it into your invoicing software. Maybe you can take your time tracked, get a nifty formula even inside make, I.e. nTB applicant formula, and you can automate your whole invoicing process. You can do something that's running every time on the first day of the month. You can have it generate at least a draft for you so you don't need to manually search for everything. So automating something like zero in this case is something that's also quite common. Or QuickBooks, again, very common to interact with lookup time reporting data. A lot of use cases with integrating time reporting data with something else. For people that track time natively in ClickUp and don't go for something like Harvest, for example, which can do that much better than ClickUp because Harvest is a dedicated time tracking platform. So of course they do time tracking to a better extent than a click up. This examples could go on and on. Let me think of just another one. There's a lot of them.

What comes to my mind.

Go ahead.

I just wanted to make the point. What comes to my mind based on what you said is that it really seems like MAKE is the glue that makes all of these scenarios work. I'm almost wondering when was the moment that you actually discovered that this is possible? The first kind of, you know, aha moment when it turned out like how much make can do here?

That's a very nice question. Pretty much at the moment I got frustrated with Trying to do something and click up and oh, I just can't do this. How can I do this? And you start just looking into things and once you hear the first time about something like Zapier make, that's when your eyes open. Oh, what's that? Oh, that integrates with stuff. Oh, it can do something different as you can donate doing that platform. Oh, interesting. And usually when I try to build something even now and I'm having a hard time getting a native workflow for that, I don't waste time and go to make and see. Okay, what will definitely to happen? Will this make it any easier? And often that's the only answer for doing something that you really want, especially when it involves other platform like let's say your G suite business. And you want to have every client that you get with their own G Drive folder and with some templated files. Insider. Every client should have its own G Drive folder with some very particular thing like a kickoff deck that you can templatize or some Google Doc or a spreadsheet or whatever you want, you have there by default, files inside there. And every client should have its own G Drive folder with some very particular thing like a kickoff deck that you can templatize or some Google Doc or a spreadsheet or whatever you want, you have there by default and share that with the client maybe so great example where May can do that for you. So you can set up a workflow for this again, you can use HubSpot as a trigger. A deal has been closed. Awesome. Create a new G Drive folder which will have these templates and then you get a ClickUp test notify you, hey, you have a new deal. Please make sure to configure the drive template, make sure to convert your client folder, your project list and blah, blah, blah. A lot of things that can be done that you just can't do without. Nick.

Yeah, I can hear that. I hear that. Yeah, that's really exciting. Just, you know, I feel like I should play around with that. Maybe even for some of our marketing workflows. So look, Alex, I promised, I think it was like 10 minutes ago to do a little bit of a show and tell here during this episode of the Zen pilot Live show. I thought we might move into that. So on the subject of external reporting, I mean this is a whole story. We weren't planning on doing screen sharing today, to be honest. But Alex, you did some extra work there. Prepared something that will allow you dear. Well, we usually say watchers and listeners, but in this Case just the watchers to see what, you know, a simple workflow or reporting in this case might look like in action. Let's try and pull that up. So do you want to do a little bit of an intro into what the watchers are going to be seeing here?

Yes. So what I like the most is when we bridge ClickUp data with integrations and with external reporting. Something like Looker Studio, for example, or could be Power Bi as well. And what's another limitation that you can find in ClickUp? You want to build. You want to find out the KPI, you want to find out a metric, but there's no way for you to properly find that. Like, for example, you want to calculate the percentage of all of your tasks that have been closed on time planned last week. Like, you want to calculate something like that. You can find out how many tasks you had planned, you can see how many of them were closed, but you can't really see that probably in a percentage. And even if you can get there with something like a pie chart, which can work, this doesn't retain historical data at all. Next week that will go away unless you change all the filters to get to the same data that you've been the other week. This is not scalable for having historical insights into your performance. So what needs to happen in that case so you can really find out exactly what you want from ClickUp in the way you want is bridging ClickUp with integrations can be simple, can be more complex. Google spreadsheet depends on the metric that you want to track. And then with something like a Looker Studio dashboard to build the visualization from the spreadsheet. So that's what I'm about to show right now.

Okay, let's pull it up. Okay, I think. Okay, so what you're gonna see on the screen is gonna change. Now, which view did I want here? This one? No, this one. Okay, well, dear watchers, let us know that you can see this. You might want to go full screen to see some of the text on there. So, Alex, walk us through. You know what we're seeing here? I see that we're right now in ClickUp, not in Looker. So tell us about this.

We're starting the workflow from A to C in this case. So let's say that you have something set up like this and you find out what did I have planned, for example, for last week, and you want to find out the great enough what was closed on time, what's still not started, what's in progress you want to see your total closed tasks by the team. How many of them were closed on schedule? How many of them were closed off schedule? Like you want to check something like this and you want to calculate some more advanced ratios. If you. If you've been watching our blog, there is an article there written by Jeff about the free ratio that you should be tracking in an agency. There we talk about the completed ratio, compliance ratio and velocity ratio, which we'll see in just a bit. That's pretty much where they want to go with that. Those things pretty much use some metrics and calculate them between each other. So for example, velocity is the direct ratio between total plan test last week and total close test last week. Now how can you see this as a percentage here? Simple. You can. So that's where we're going next using integrations or if you don't want to go with integration, you can also do this manually. But if you want to do this for I know maybe a lot of other client maybe want to do this by folder by client, by project can be. Is the direct ratio between total planned tasks last week very cumbersome. You can then get all of this data inside a spreadsheet that you can configure which will have you can total close test last week. Now how can you see this as a percentage here? Simple. You can. So that's where we're going next. Using integrations or if you don't want to go with integration, you can also do this manually. But if you want to do this for I know maybe a lot of other clients, maybe you want to do this by folder, by client, by project can be various formats. We basically want to get your numbers there, structure your data in a way that the dashboard will will read and understand. And we also like to use some advanced spreadsheet calculations here and there. Very cumbersome. You can then get all of this data inside. I'm pointing out those ratios I'm talking about and what we like to call the company score. This is how you find out if an agency is performing well in ClickUp or not. And besides where the data is being dumped because really data is being dumped in just this one. But if you want to get to the level where you're transposing this data in a way that an external dashboard like LUCA can read, you need to get a bit creative and transpose things for them. You might have this dimension plan tasks, but you want to see it broken down by the type of tasks that fall under this category. Like these guys, we can't do that. You need a column with all of these. So you need to pretty much get creative and you need to get some pretty nifty formulas to find out the metrics that you want to be transposed in that location. So this can be simple, can be more complex. Definitely get something like this, get all of our main metrics as a separate column, a separate sheet. So this thing can then feed something like a pie chart, which uses one dimension, because this thing, these are four dimensions. So you need to get creative with your spreadsheet format and data modeling. And it can be. Can be simple, can be crazy. Depends a lot on what you're trying to achieve. But what is the outcome of all of this? Because so far, okay, this doesn't look that amazing, right? Looks very weird. The end goal is having something that looks like this thing over here where you can see something and pretty much calculate whatever you want to calculate. In this case, see a breakdown, what you want to have over there, break down tasks the way you want to break them down, find out your key ratios, where they sit, the level where you'd like to get them. None of this that you're seeing here is not really achievable with native ClickUp dashboards and dashboard cards in this case. So the only way to get something like this completed ratio over here is to calculate directly, complete the task against the plan tasks. So that's how we got this guy or the company score. It's a very advanced calculation of all of these three ratios, which again is made in a Google spreadsheet, which can handle these things where you weight the compliance ratio, the complete ratio, the velocity ratio, which can be quite crazy. And we get it here. At the end of the day, we can properly track your performance the way you want. And this works fine with time tracking data as well. If you want to track your estimated versus actual time per client, you can do a lot of that like this as well. And you can also use this to bubble up other issues. Like we want to like to see how many tasks are having QA issues or have the missing assignees, due dates, estimates, time track, key custom fields, how many overdues we have, how many of them were unassigned, and how many of our planned tasks from last week got overdue in this case. So this is where ClickUp data gathered in a spreadsheet or a database really can be. Any other database can get you. It can really get whatever metric you want. If you identify the data correctly, you learn how to model it, how to extract it. How to play with it and you can achieve whatever you want. It can really make give you a lot of things. And this was pretty much, pretty much it. An insight on what can ClickUp give you reporting wise? If you thought, oh, ClickUp dashboards are limited, they can give me that much.

And is it possible to change the time horizon there? So for example, I can see this is August 6th to 12th, like yeah, obviously.

So you can get custom time ranges depending on how often you're extracting this data. So if you're getting this daily, you could look at this daily, see every day differently. For the purpose of this dashboard demo, this is sample data that's just for this week. So yep, I could go here in the previous week for sure. I probably won't have or I actually have some data. So you can choose the time range here. You can filter by something like the space that you want to see. You want to see all the space, only one space, see how things are going over there. And we can apply this to a lot of things. Like you can do this with clients, with themes, with client leads, with a lot of stuff. So this can really get very creative with what you want to build here. First thing first, need to identify what do I want to look at? Do I want to look at a specific metric? Do I really need to look at it? Because data can be very tricky. People often fall into the trap of oh, I want a lot of data, and then they just get tens of KPIs and they don't do nothing with them. So it's important to get only the ones that really matter for you. So that's the first thing. Find out what you want, try to find out how you can identify them and then see what's the best, what's the best method to achieve that and get that result. And this can work for internal purposes, but also for sharing something with your clients on what you've done for them. But probably this would be a long stretch for people to show for clients, for agencies to share with their clients what's going on from ClickUp. A lot of agencies do use Looker Studio to build something from analytics or from Google Ads or from other platforms. But where people don't really think to use Looker Studio is to look at their ClickUp data. So that's where this platform can be very useful. And this one is totally free. Spreadsheets are totally free. Even if you don't have the knowledge to do integrations, you can still do a lot of this, even with some manual gathering if you're smart about building the dashboard the right way, you can export all of this stuff. You can export the pie chart. You can get in a spreadsheet model a little bit and doesn't take that much if you really want to. It's just a matter of being ambitious enough to get to that.

Okay. Well, of course, on the other end of the spectrum, if this view like in looker, show that thing one more time. It's a thing of beauty. Like seriously so fresh here. Okay, I get to be excited about this. If something like that looks like something that would be useful for your agency to be able to surface from your tasks in general or your ClickUp in particular, you should go to zenpirelo.com call, have a call with us and we can build something like that for you. It's part of a larger process of revamping your agency operations and fixing chaotic project management. You know, in particular or in general, I should have said, but yeah, this is. This is part of it. All right, I'm gonna take this off of Streamyard. Pull us back. See, they get to see your guitars because it switched to this view. There's your guitars on your. Right there. I even took my face with me here, take a screenshot of that. Move on. Alrighty. If you have additional questions about that, watchers and listeners, let us know. This is actually one of the first kind of personal, kind of touch points that we had. Even before I joined Zenpilot, we were on this kind of intro call and I was. You were like, here's my guitar. Well, here's mine. I remember that kind of as part of our personal history. Okay, watchers and listeners, if you have questions about reporting or, you know what Alex show there, hit us with those questions. We can pull it up again if you want to see it. Jax is like, sure, yeah. You know, I got. I got solos even in my band's repertoire. So, yeah, they solo. You like them? I have them. Anyway, who's the better guitar player? I don't play guitar. So Alex wins by default. Serious click up questions only. No, just kidding. Just hit us with whatever. Okay, we've got 10 minutes more on the clock and two more use cases, at least from the title to go through. Let's see which one I should ask you about. Okay, so I feel like one of those is more kind of generally applicable than the other. So if I were to choose whether we're talking about out of office management or eos next, let's talk out of office management, because not everybody's on eos, everybody's dealing with out of office management. Similar question to before. Can you tell us about. Oh, Jackson I think is very well. Very well. Okay, we take requests. I'm going to switch it then. And if Jackson's curious about EOs, Alex, load the other tape in your mind. Let's talk about EOS in ClickUp. There's specialized tools, of course, for running eos. Here at zenpilot, for example, we're running EOS basically all in ClickUp. Tell us, Alex, about how that's done. What are the benefits of having EOS in ClickUp and some of the kind of high level structure of how things are organized, the EOS system, how it can be organized in ClickUp?

Yeah, definitely. So even though it might sound quite complex, to get the EOS structure in ClickUp, it's fairly straightforward. You need to just have a location to host your EOS command center. Like your VTO, in this case in location for your L10 folders. Now this depends on your team size. If it's your just one small team, you might have just one L10 folder, you might have five L10 folders and they might live in different locations. So it depends a lot of that. But it's very simple. It's a matter of a few folders to host your issues, your accountability chart, your rocks, like having a command center for all of your rocks, then splitting rocks in the right L10 folder where rocks will leave as tasks. Obviously everything will leave as tasks except the accountability chart in this case, which would be either a ClickUp whiteboard or an embed mirror board or LucidChart or something else. And EOS in ClickUp mainly is great because of the rocks and issues, because it makes these things very actionable and relatable to your real work that's going on with project management. So you can, for example, transform a real task in your workspace to an issue like, okay, we've been working on this, deliverable for this client. This is an issue want to talk about in your EOS weekly meeting? Add it to the issues list and you see there you can see all the context that has been going on and talk with your team about that. It's very convenient to look at issues that way. That's one example with rocks, again, pretty straightforward. You plan, you create your rocks in one location, you send them over. Maybe you have rocks by theme. Recently I've been working with a client that has rocks by client project. So each client project has their own rocks and each client with their own space. In this case. And that can also work every space with their own L10 folder, with their own rocks, everything centralized in one location. And you can use those rocks as goals or milestones. They don't need to be the actual task that you're working on, but you keep track of them somewhere and you can link other real tasks to those rocks. So if you're working on some projects tied to this rock, you can link really those tasks to the rock task and you can find everything in one place. So that can be again, very convenient. But also for rock planning and having your documents of your rocks, you can create a template in ClickUp for a smart rock planning and a Pro tip. If you will use ClickUp AI, you can use ClickUp AI to plan your rock inside lookup and help you mill it out natively. And you can then convert the milestones to actual tasks writing ClickUp. So it can be very useful to plan your rocks that way. And yeah, the OS and ClickUp can be very fun or easy. So if you're running EOS and you don't have it in ClickUp, I definitely recommend looking that up.

Yeah, I really like the visibility. I honestly couldn't imagine it any other way right now where I don't have to leave ClickUp. I just go to the appropriate place on ClickUp and I can see everybody's rocks. I can see whether they're. And this is all done through custom fields. Right? On track, off track, green, red. I can wrap my head around that. I can understand that. Which quarter does this rock fall into? Is it a company rock? Is it a personal rock? And then whatever custom field you've got, you can always filter by it. You can always create a separate view that takes only a certain person's rocks, certain team's rocks, or a certain type of rock, personal or company. There's a lot of things you can do with that within the tool. And I really like what you said about issues with the functionality of having tasks and multiple lists. You can have a task that lives in the, let's say, marketing blog list and then temporarily move it to issues for the marketing or the growth team to discuss and then moves out of the issues list potentially. But all the discussion is there, all the comments are there. Before it became an issue, while it was being discussed as an issue. Afterwards, it can be tracked. So having this one place where everything lives, when it's well organized and you've got these signposts of where to look for what, that can be really useful. All right, we've Only got four minutes here left. Okay. Jackson is following up here very much. The star of this segment, he's saying, I've researched other platforms that exclusively run eos, but having it integrated into our workspace has saved us so much time. Love the concept of using ClickUp AI to inform rock planning. Yeah, I mean AI can be really useful for that. I've got this goal, how to break it down. You know, it gives you 12 possible steps. Four might not make sense and then some more. Some others might. And Jackson is continuing as a facilitator. It makes it so much easier to organize to DOS in real time and still participate. Thank you so much for contributing to our session here today, Jackson. We really appreciate you.

Jackson gets it.

Yeah, Jackson gets it. There you go. All righty. So we've only got a few more minutes in the session. I don't think it's enough to go deep into out of office management. We'll have to leave that for follow up session. I'm super sorry everyone. I hope this was, this was still useful though. Alex, I'm going to ask you my insurance question though, just in case I neglected anything here. Was there anything more that you wanted to mention here? Any closing thoughts that I failed to ask about that you wanted to leave with our audience here today?

Can't really say there is anything in particular. Kuba. We talk about stuff. There will obviously be a lot of things to talk about, a lot of other things that can be done in ClickUp and we just don't have enough time in a day to talk about them all. Sorry, I was reading the comment.

Yeah, yeah, Jackson said. Okay, I'm going to pull it up if you want. Alex did say once in the call that I was good at ClickUp and it made my day. We're making our day here, Jackson. Alrighty. Well if no extra closing thoughts then I'll contribute just a few more things that you can do after the session to stay in touch with us and the Zenpilot crew. Thank you Jackson for that final comment there. So remember to, you know, if you're meeting us for the first time. Hi, we're Zenpilot. We're helping agencies fix chaotic project management and chaotic operations. We do that with ClickUp and teamwork.com actually go to zenpilot.com to learn more about us. If you're thinking of self implementing one of these tools and you want to have like a good framework to start with, definitely look up our ClickUp for agencies guide and teamwork.com for agencies guide. You'll find that in the Resources section. If you want to stay up to date on what Zenpilot is doing, two best ways to do that would be to follow zenpilot on LinkedIn all of our personal profiles. The stuff gets reposted into the company profile so you'll be up to date and also subscribe to first class operations. That's also on Zenpilot.com, resources section. The dropdown has first class operations. That's my newsletter where I share everything that's happening in the Zenpilot world and beyond. Some nice things from the agency space or operations space to keep you up to date and to make you a better agency operator. I want this to be the favorite newsletter for agency operators. And of course, if anything that Alex showed here or you want to work with Alex here, you know, if anything of that was interesting or it seems like it might push your agency forward, this additional visibility, accountability, these integrations that will make your life easier and save you time, go to zenpower.com call grab a call with us and it's the easiest and fastest way to find out if what we've shown here is a good fit for your agency in terms of the size of your agency, the type of business that you do. We'll tell you how we can help. And if we don't see a way for you to achieve at least a 4x ROI within the first year on your Zenpilot investment, we just won't recommend moving forward with us because we want this to be a win for you and win for us. Future live streams are going to be showing up on LinkedIn and YouTube. We don't have a live stream scheduled right now, but if we schedule another one, it'll be on LinkedIn, it'll be on YouTube and definitely I'll mention it in first class operations. So keep monitoring that. And that's our time here today. Thank you so so much watchers and listeners. This was a pretty lively session in the comments. Really appreciate that. Also thank you to all the pilots who joined today. Really appreciate you. I'm going to shout you out on Slack later on. Alex, final thoughts as we close off here.

Was great being here with you, Kuba. Waiting to do this again. Sometimes that's good.

Yeah, we got to talk about out of office management and probably some other use cases that we're going to get questions about later on. All right, thanks everyone. So, so, so much. Have a nice rest of the day and we'll see you next time. And I'm going to hit end broadcast now. Bye.