Together with Anastasiia Matsuga, a New Business Director of Sasquatch Digital agency, we discussed the benefits of Worksection for digital marketing, the pros and cons of time tracking, and how their team manages to work almost entirely remotely.
About the company:
Sasquatch Digital is a digital marketing agency founded in 2009. It ranks fifth in the SMM category in the digital services rating by IAB Ukraine. The team has implemented numerous digital projects for major brands, including Nike, Jägermeister, Libero, Libresse, British American Tobacco, Mitsubishi Motors, United Nations, OLX, and others. In total, the agency has completed over 250 projects in Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Georgia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other countries.
How did you manage projects and communication before Worksection?
During our early stages, we used Excel files, folders on Google Drive, and tasks were assigned via email. This led to a 20% loss: files were not sent on time, someone missed a meeting, and so on. Later on, we started experimenting with different task management systems until we settled on Worksection. And for the past seven years, we have been using this system!
How does the Sasquatch Digital team use Worksection?
All our projects are closed in-house. We have some non-staff employees who are involved in projects but are still added to Worksection as users with limited functionality. They have access to several projects related only to their work area. The main team has access to the projects they are working on, while the director and department managers have access to all projects and can close tasks or reschedule them. As an account administrator, I also have access to all projects and can see who assigns which tasks.
Have you implemented a time tracker into your work?
We track working hours annually for one month to adjust the project costs and know how long each task takes. Currently, we do not regularly use the timer, but it was very helpful to us during the full-scale invasion. At that time, most clients froze their work, but we needed to retain the team. Roman (Note: Roman Herashchenko, CEO) came up with a formula according to which we worked on an hourly payment basis. So until we reached full capacity, people calculated the number of hours and their corresponding salaries.
What is the value of Worksection specifically for your team?
The main advantage is having unified access to all projects, which allows for structured management and deadline control. Worksection also helps with budgeting. We start a timer for a specific task and see how much time, for example, a designer spends on creating an illustration or retouching a portrait. This way, we understand the time required for each task and each specialist.
This helps us calculate project profitability. Budgets are established before the work begins because we know in advance, based on previous data, how much time each specialist will spend on a particular task. So each specialist has an hourly rate recorded. However, periodically, we start a timer for a specific project to determine if the actual amount of work differs from the planned and promised amount to the client. This is often relevant for complex multi-component projects.
Such an evaluation allows us to understand whether it is profitable to work with a particular client and also helps us justify budget updates. If we initially agreed with the client that a specialist would work on the project for 40 hours, but it turns out to be 60 hours in reality, we need to either reconsider our approach to working with this client or negotiate different terms.
In general, this helps us track the actual workload and consider how many projects each specialist at the agency can handle.
However, we realized that regular time tracking made specialists uncomfortable because they felt like they were constantly being monitored. It was an experiment that we kept for specific tasks.
The second advantage is real-time communication within tasks. This is important because one-third of our team is located abroad, and some of us are scattered throughout Ukraine, so almost all of us work remotely.
What features of the service simplify your work?
Our team actively uses visibility control, so each person sees only the projects they are involved in.
And also notifications. Conveniently, there is integration with Telegram, where all notifications from Worksection are visible. I can even avoid logging into the system if I see that I haven’t been mentioned and I don’t have any urgent tasks.
Without Worksection, we would spend a lot of time synchronizing all projects. One-third of them could even be missed altogether.
The foundation of our positioning is stability. This means that everything is done according to the agreed-upon deadline, and we not only control our work but also ensure that clients provide everything on time from their side. We know who and what to expect. It is precisely this quality and attention to detail that would be impossible without streamlining internal processes through Worksection.