Project/Customer Management and Multiple Users

[Hartmann]

I am working with two other people on projects and we need to be able to see what the other is working on and where we stand in projects. We also need to manage invoicing, proposals, etc. from a central place. I have looked through the forums and found posts for activeCollab and basecamp and others. Are these the best options?

We'd prefer to go the free or extremely cheap route and we'd like something that would be able to track time per task/project so that we could get better at making accurate proposals. Are we better off rolling our own?

Also, I would like to know the most common ways of billing a client. We are usually doing specific projects, not really month by month type stuff (though the projects may span over months). Are we better off setting milestones in the contract and requirements where certain amounts are required by the client?

Thanks!

[Jelena]

I dont think both basecamp and activeCollab support invoices. I've been using basecamp for more then 6 months now. However, simplicity around it has some downsides. I'm actually waiting for first stable version of activeCollab to give it a try.

[tke71709]

There are plenty of opensource project management tools out there that might be better for you than basecamp et al.

Of course, the point of basecamp is that it's simple to use.

[DigitalRealm]

We use Basecamp and it has truly worked perfectly well for us. Basecamp is very simple to use so our clients love it, which means we love it! It DOES NOT support invoices but there are several good invoicing solutions out there for that.

[Hartmann]

Ok, we've decided on a few more requirements... Lately we've been using dotProjekt and it is alright but something a little more feature rich would be great.

We need something that we can host ourselves. We need customer management.
There needs to be project management with milestones and tasks, possibly with the tasks linked to the milestones directly.

There needs to be a file management system in place so that we can have a central repository of documents related to each client.

I would also like a billing system, where we could get time amounts for each task and assign a value to each of them.

It is starting to look like something that we may need to write ourselves to get everything we need.

Is there a pay for or free solution that works on Linux/PHP/Python/MySQL?

[meridiancrest]

I've been looking at SugarCRM.
They have an open source version that you can host on your own webserver.
They also have all kinds of plugins for invoicing, billing, etc @ sugarforge.org

Let us know if you find something else respectable