THE CHALLENGE
Our company was founded in 2011 by an editor and colorist that decided to join forces. We’ve grown steadily and organically, adding team members and service offerings along the way. In 2017, we built out a new facility and started offering sound as a new service.
Before using farmerswife, we used ActualizeIt and Google Calendar. ActualizeIt was fantastic at bidding and actualizing projects, but we were looking for more tools in scheduling suites and talent as well as more flexibility and functionality in what our bids looked like and how they worked. Ultimately, we were looking for a way to better manage projects and keep our artists informed.
THE SOLUTION
We started using farmerswife in 2019. We use it to estimate, schedule, track, actualize and invoice projects as well as manage the artists and other resources involved. We use the Dispatch/Media Library as our “vault” database to track hard drives and other resources entering and leaving the facility.
farmerwife is our hub for producers and artists to reference for the information they need or the most up-to-date schedule for a project. Ultimately, farmerswife has allowed us to have a central place to help us manage the business. It’s a deeply capable and complicated piece of software, and the value of having everything in one place where our producers and artists are all seeing the same thing together is huge.
farmerswife has the ability to scale well if managed properly. We were able to move into a hybrid/remote world seamlessly, and honestly, farmerswife is as flexible or rigid as you want it to be. It can be daunting and overwhelming, but once it’s been tailored to our workflow, it’s been a great tool. It doesn’t do everything perfectly. At times we’ve had to change how we’d want to do things to accommodate the way the software works, but we’ve ultimately landed on something that works well for us as a company.
THE SUPPORT
Overall, great. Most responses have been super helpful, and the support team is typically quick and attentive. Some things have fallen through the cracks, but it’s never been anything mission-critical. Several of the things we’ve asked for have found their way into new versions of the software, or onto the roadmap, which is encouraging to see.
