DEV Community: ERP if.team

How Architecture Studio YOD Group Keeps Complex Projects on Track

ERP if.team — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:58:34 +0000

Opening a restaurant or a hotel means juggling dozens of moving parts over several months. Concept, market analysis, architecture, interior design, sign-off from the owner, construction oversight. Each stage hooks into the next: planning has to be approved before design begins, design has to be locked before materials get ordered. Miss a single dependency and the whole timeline shifts.

YOD Group lives this reality daily. The Ukrainian architecture studio handles end-to-end projects in hospitality — restaurants, hotels, bars, spa complexes, event spaces. The team blends design, business consulting, and management, so a client walks away with more than an interior: they get a working business model for the venue, built around profitability and a fast return on investment.

To keep all of this in one field of view, the studio moved to if.team, a Ukrainian platform for managing projects, tasks, teams, and finances. Here's how YOD Group structured its work inside the platform — from Gantt-chart planning to reports that go straight into client presentations.

What needed sorting out

The studio runs several projects in parallel, each at its own stage. The core need was simple to state: see how tasks depend on one another within a project, without keeping those links in someone's head or scattered across spreadsheets.

Reporting sat right beside that. YOD Group regularly needs charts and summaries — internally, to know where a project stands, and externally, for clients who want a clear view of progress and milestones during meetings. Assembling those by hand every time meant pulling designers away from actual design work.

Hence the brief for the system: surface task dependencies, give a transparent picture of workload, and let the team prepare reports in a few clicks rather than half a day.

Planning on a Gantt chart

The studio's main planning tool is the Gantt chart. Every task ties to a specific project, carries a deadline and an owner, and the chart lays out which tasks block later stages and which are critical to the finish line.

There's flexibility in how you view it: one overview across all projects at once, a detailed task-level schedule, or a single chart for one project. Any of these exports to PDF — and that's what closed the reporting gap. A few minutes, and there's a ready document for a client or for management, with progress and milestones visible without extra commentary. The team coordinates more smoothly, misunderstandings drop off, and the process stays transparent at every level.

Statuses, deadlines, and workload

Each task's status is visible in real time: open, in progress, or done. Next to it sit the owner, the deadline, the priority, and the scope. A delay surfaces right away instead of at the end of a stage, when there's no longer room to react. Duplicated work becomes obvious too, before it quietly eats up someone's hours.

A separate view covers workload, broken down by project, task, and role. The data lands in charts and tables, so it's clear who's stretched thin and who has room to take on more. YOD Group leans on these numbers when distributing work across people and revisiting deadlines.

Teams, roles, and access

Not everyone at the studio needs to see everything. An architect working on a single restaurant shouldn't have to wade through a dozen unrelated projects — it only scatters their attention.

So access rights are set up to show each person only the projects and tasks they're responsible for. That keeps things orderly and the data protected. Teams form around specific projects: you can assign a lead, distribute roles, and define the level of access to different functions. When a new designer joins, bringing them into the relevant projects is straightforward — nothing extraneous opens up, and lines of responsibility stay clean.

Recurring processes

A lot of the studio's work repeats from project to project — the same approval stages, the same checkpoints. Setting them up by hand each time is needless friction.

The platform lets the team save templates for these tasks, send reminders, and update statuses automatically. Each recurring task links to a project or a team, so the sequence holds and nothing drops out of the chain. The system shows which stages are finished, what needs attention, and flags key dates on its own. The team, in turn, focuses on decisions and the creative side instead of manually babysitting routine steps.

Reports and analytics

Reports generate per project and per team, giving a full picture: task status, how loaded people are, overall progress. The information comes as tables, charts, and graphs, so spotting where the process stalls takes little time.

YOD Group puts this data to work twice over. Internally — to adjust plans, reallocate resources, and keep deadlines in check. Externally — in client presentations, where the reports demonstrate transparency and the results achieved.

What changed

YOD Group pulled control over every project and task into one place. Dependencies between tasks, deadlines, accountable roles — all of it reads from a single system, with no need to piece the picture together from scattered sources.

Templates and automated reminders cut the time spent on management overhead and lowered the odds of missing something important. Flexible roles, custom fields, and filters make it quick to bring new people on board and keep order across every project at once.

The studio grew as a result — in project volume and in headcount — without losing its grip on operations. Routine moved into automation, and the focus returned to what YOD Group exists for: creating architecture that works both as a space and as a business. For the studio, if.team became a platform that matures alongside it — new needs find a solution here rather than running into the limits of the tool.

More about what the platform can do, plus a link to book a demo: https://if.team/ua/.

How One Startup Brought Subscriptions, Finances, and Tasks Under One Roof

ERP if.team — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:34:40 +0000

A startup in its early days rarely thinks about systems. Five clients, a shared spreadsheet, a group chat — that's enough. But subscriptions start stacking up, payments overlap, tasks scatter across tools, and suddenly the team spends more time coordinating than building. Patching things together with separate apps stops working faster than most founders expect.

That's where one team found itself before switching to if.team, a Ukrainian project management and ERP platform built for service-oriented companies. The product they were building ran on a subscription model, and from the very first paying users, pain points emerged: missed renewal dates, messy financials, support tickets lost in chat threads, and no single place where the whole picture came together.

They needed one environment that could handle subscription tracking, real-time finances, client management, and team tasks — without weeks of setup. This is how they set it up, and what changed after.

What the team was looking for

Before settling on a platform, the team outlined what they actually needed — each requirement born from a specific frustration.

One place for everything. Tasks, projects, finances, clients, payroll — jumping between four platforms and reconciling data manually was eating hours every week. Every extra tool meant another login, another subscription fee, and another place where something could break.

Financial clarity without a finance department. The team didn't need enterprise accounting software. They needed a clear, fast answer to two questions: how much is each client bringing in, and where is the money going? Previously, getting that answer meant pulling data from three different sources and spending an hour in a spreadsheet.

Subscription tracking that doesn't rely on memory. With recurring revenue as the core model, every missed renewal was lost income. The old process — a spreadsheet with color-coded rows that someone had to check daily — wasn't scaling.

Tasks without the mess. Development, support, client requests — everything lived in different channels. Some in a project board, some in email, some in Slack threads. Pieces inevitably fell through the cracks.

Fast onboarding. A system that takes a week to learn is a system the team won't adopt. The first useful workflow had to be up and running within a day.

Subscriptions as projects

For a company whose revenue depends on renewals, subscription management is where the money lives. Losing track of one expiration date can mean losing a client — not because they wanted to leave, but because nobody reminded them to pay.

In if.team, the team set up each subscription as a separate project. Inside: expiration dates, payment terms, status, and a link to the client's profile. The system color-codes what needs attention — yellow for approaching deadlines, red for overdue. No one has to remember to check a spreadsheet; the signal surfaces on its own.

Automated reminders handle the rest. When a subscription nears its end, the responsible person gets a notification. The full history of interactions with that client sits right there — previous agreements, payment patterns, support context. For a young company where every client visibly affects revenue, this level of visibility has direct financial value.

Finances in one place

Two questions haunt every growing startup: how much are we actually making, and where is it all going? As long as the answers live in separate spreadsheets maintained by different people, they're always approximate.

The team consolidated their financial data into a single module. Incoming payments from clients, outgoing transactions, internal transfers between accounts — all recorded and updated in real time. They can now see revenue by project, operational costs, and administrative overhead without manually assembling a report.

Payroll runs automatically, factoring in hourly rates, logged hours, and time off. This removed a recurring source of errors and freed up hours that used to go into manual calculations every month.

P&L reports break down operational and net profit by period. Both recurring and one-time expenses are tracked and automatically reflected in the overall picture. For investors or partners who need visibility, the team can grant limited access to financial reports — enough for transparency without exposing everything.

The result: a financial dashboard that doesn't need to be assembled at the end of each month. It always shows the current state, and decisions rest on fresh numbers rather than figures that are already a week or two old.

Clients and leads

Once the client count crosses a dozen or so, keeping contacts, interaction history, and deal stages in your head — or worse, in scattered notes — stops being viable. A separate CRM is one option, but that's yet another subscription, another interface, and another place to pull data from.

The built-in client module solved this. Each client card holds contacts, communication history, transactions, and linked projects. A manager opens one screen and sees the full picture — no tab-switching, no searching through email threads.

For new inquiries, there's a lead pipeline with a Kanban board. Each potential client moves through stages — from first contact to closed deal. When a lead converts, a project can be created from it in one click, carrying over all the context. Automated reminders for follow-ups ensure no contact goes cold simply because someone forgot.

For a small team with limited bandwidth, removing the need for a standalone CRM and cutting down on context-switching freed up meaningful time.

Tasks and support

Tasks in a startup come from everywhere at once: the development backlog, a support ticket, a last-minute client request. When these live in different places — a project board here, an email there, a Slack message somewhere else — some of them inevitably get lost.

In the new setup, all tasks live in one workspace. Each has an assignee, a creator, a deadline, a priority level, subtasks, and comments. A Kanban board shows what's in progress at a glance, and a Gantt chart helps distribute workload across people and time.

Support got its own workflow: client requests automatically generate tasks linked to the relevant project and client. Context is immediately visible — no need to ask who the person is or which project they're writing about. Tickets enter a queue with clear ownership and priority instead of floating in a chat thread where they might go unread.

The team stopped relying on individual memory and chat-message luck. Every task leaves a trace in the system, and that trace is searchable.

Time tracking and cost control

Understanding the true cost of each project and each client requires knowing how much time goes into them. In a startup where people juggle multiple workstreams, this information is especially valuable — and especially hard to gather manually.

Time tracking is embedded directly into tasks. Hours attach to specific assignments and projects, and the system automatically calculates costs based on hourly rates or fixed salaries. Daily and per-task reports show how workload distributes across the team, and project budgets update in real time.

This connection between time and money lets the team catch overspending before it becomes a problem. For a startup where every dollar on the balance sheet matters, the difference between spotting an overrun next month and spotting it today is tangible.

What changed after the switch

The team consolidated what used to span four or five separate tools into one: subscriptions, finances, clients, tasks, time tracking, and support. The need to reconcile data manually and cross-check information from different sources disappeared.

Subscriptions stopped slipping through the cracks. Each one has a deadline, a status, and an owner, and the system sends reminders before the client even has a chance to forget about payment. Finances update automatically and reflect the company's position right now — not as of the last time someone had an hour to build a spreadsheet. Tasks and support requests live in a shared space with clear accountability, independent of whether someone happened to read a chat message.

For a startup still gaining momentum, this turned out to be decisive: the team's time shifted away from organizational overhead and back toward building the product itself. And the structure put in place early on created a foundation the company can grow on — without migrating to yet another platform every six months.

More about the platform and a link to book a demo: https://if.team/ua/.