Task management for multi-location businesses with 2 to 10 sites

Say you own four bike shops around Bristol, each with a workshop out the back. Clifton books services over the phone and Redland keeps a paper diary on the counter. Bedminster has a whiteboard that someone wipes every Monday, and Keynsham does something with sticky notes that its manager swears by. They’re all busy. You can’t tell from the car park which one is about to run out of inner tubes.

The usual first fix is a head-office spreadsheet each manager updates on a Friday. It lasts about six weeks.

In Klusko each site gets its own workspace (Clifton, Redland, Bedminster and Keynsham) plus a Head office workspace for buying, payroll and marketing. The shops keep their projects there, usually a Shop board and a Workshop board, and staff star the ones they use so they open straight to them.

Head office can open every site’s workspace, and everything updates live, so when Tariq drags a service job to Done in Clifton it moves on Gwen’s screen at the same moment. Nobody fills in a Friday spreadsheet. On the Team plan the Table view lays a site’s tasks out in rows with your custom fields, which is the quickest way to see every open workshop job and its booking date in one list. There’s more on the views in tasks and projects.

Every shop has its opening routine, and most of it is the same at each site. Save it once as a task template with subtasks, create one for each shop, and set it to repeat daily. When Freya ticks off Tuesday’s checks, Wednesday’s appear. The weekly fire alarm test and the monthly stock count work the same way. A typical set of subtasks for a bike shop:

• Count the till float and note it on the task
• Check the alarm panel for overnight faults
• Put the display bikes and A-board out
• Read today’s workshop bookings
• Charge the e-bike demo batteries

Recurring tasks and templates are on the Team plan, and there’s a longer piece on weekly and monthly rotas under recurring work.

Mostly because head office sends an instruction by email and three of the four shops act on it. The fourth didn’t see it, or saw it and meant to get round to it, and you find out on your next visit. Put the instruction on each site’s board as a task with that manager’s name on it, and you can see which one hasn’t moved without ringing round.

The other half is sharing what works. Say Bedminster starts booking services in 45-minute slots and clears its backlog in a month. In most small chains that idea stays in Bedminster. In Klusko, Gwen posts it in the all-shops channel, saves the setup as a template and mentions the task in her message, so the other managers can open it straight from the chat. Clifton tries it the following week. We think this is probably where a chain of four gets most of its value, more than from any view or report.

Klusko doesn’t connect to your till, EPOS or booking system, because there are no integrations or API. There are no automations either, so an instruction for all four shops means adding the task four times (a template makes that quick, but it’s still four). And there’s no offline mode, which you’ll notice if your stockroom is a basement with one bar of signal.

On phones, the iPhone app is in testing and there’s no Android app, so shop staff will mostly use the counter computer for now. For four shops with 30 staff between them, Team costs £150 a month on yearly billing, or £180 monthly. The pricing page has the rest.