StreamsApp compared with Asana
When a work order has outgrown a task tool
Asana is a serious piece of software and it is good at the thing it is for: coordinating people around work, across projects, with real reporting on top.
The friction shows up in one specific situation. A work order is not a task. It is one object that has to pass through departments in a fixed order, collecting evidence as it goes, with money attached at the end. People model that in Asana with a section per department and a convention about when you are allowed to move something, and the convention is the part that breaks.
Where Asana is the better choice
For coordinating people rather than running jobs, Asana is better and it is not close. Assignments, dependencies, workload across a team, portfolios of projects: that is what it is built for.
If your work is genuinely project-shaped, with a different plan each time and tasks that depend on each other, stages are the wrong model and a project tool is the right one.
Its integrations, its mobile apps and its reporting are more mature. If your business already runs on it and the process pain is mild, moving is not worth it.
Side by side
Product features change. Check anything here against Asana before you decide.
Can a task be completed without the information the next stage needs?
- Asana
- Yes. Completion is a checkbox. Custom fields do not block it.
- StreamsApp
- No. Required fields on a stage are checked before the job can leave it.
Can I require that the customer was actually invoiced?
- Asana
- Not without an integration and a convention.
- StreamsApp
- Yes. A stage can require an invoice raised, or paid in full, before the job closes.
Where do quotes and invoices come from?
- Asana
- Another system. The task links to it.
- StreamsApp
- From the job, with GST, customer acceptance online, and sync to Xero or QuickBooks.
Can some people be kept out of the costing stage?
- Asana
- Project-level permissions, not per section.
- StreamsApp
- Per stage, enforced by the server: editable, read-only or invisible.
Is the process documented where the work happens?
- Asana
- In a project brief or a task description.
- StreamsApp
- On the stage, visible to whoever is working on it right then.
The three things that break, every time
A job moves to the next department without what that department needs, so somebody walks back to ask. The information existed. Nothing required it.
A job gets marked done when it is not, because marking it done is a single click and nobody is checking. This is the one that costs money, because the job that is not really done is usually the one that was never billed.
Nobody can reconstruct what happened afterwards, because a task carries a completion state and a comment thread rather than a history of what each field held and when it changed.
You can keep the rest of your stack
If you run stock, bills of materials or purchasing somewhere else, keep it. There is no inventory here and none planned, so nothing is competing for that job.
What changes is the running of the work order itself: enquiry to quote to build to QA to despatch to invoice, with the gates where the money and the quality are, and the invoice landing in the accounting system you already use.
See the difference
Tick one box and a record cannot leave a step until the work behind it is actually done: the quote sent, the invoice raised, the customer told. Excel lets you type Done. Trello lets you drag the card. Neither of them knows nobody was ever billed.
Questions
- Can I move existing work across?
- Export to CSV and import it with the columns mapped to fields. You can also upload the procedure or spreadsheet the process is actually written in and have the stages proposed for you.
- Does this do project management?
- No, and it is worth being clear about that. There are no task dependencies, no critical path and no resource levelling. It runs repeatable processes where every job follows the same stages. If you need project planning, keep the project tool.
- Can both exist side by side?
- Yes, and for a lot of teams that is the sensible answer. Internal projects and coordination stay where they are. The jobs that have a customer, a gate and an invoice at the end move here.
Other comparisons
Try it against your own process
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