General Questions
Q. What is Binary Management?
A: Binary Management is an advanced project management tool developed for interior designers, consolidating four fundamental components: planning, costing, tracking and reporting.
Q. Who is Binary Management designed for?
A: If you work in interior design industry, you will definitely benefit from Binary Management. BM is designed for creative professionals and individual designers, project leaders, design managers & seniors, business owners & executive management.
Q. What are the key components of Binary Management?
A: The key components of BM are costing, planning, tracking and reporting.
The BM costing engine calculates a design fee through the input of key project data: The engine uses the built-in design templates to generate lists of tasks and aggregates the time required per task to establish a base cost for the project team. After that, simply add other direct costs and you’re set.
BM automatically generates a full project design delivery plan per stage. The design plan includes a recommended list of team members and their respective allocated tasks and are presented as a daily, weekly or monthly schedule.
Through minimal time and status inputs on allocated deliverables by your design team, BM’s tracking tool helps provide a macro and micro level real time picture on any project. Any deviations from the project plan are immediately indicated within the system.
BM consolidates all your project plan data from tracking into a single location, making it extremely easy to analyse, report and learn from the project performance.
Q. What packages does Binary Management have?
A: BM has 4 different plans to make sure everyone’s needs are met.
The individual plan is free and designed for 1 user to work on up to three projects. This package is perfect for an aspiring or beginning designer to start their journey professionally.
The team plan is perfect for a small or medium size interior design studio allowing for up to 50 users and up to 20 projects.
The enterprise plan is created for larger studios as it includes up to 100 users and up to 50 projects.
There is also the custom plan that allows for more than 100 users and includes unlimited number of projects.
Q. Is there a free trial?
A: Yes! There is a 14-day free trial that gives you an opportunity to experience all the features of BM software.
Q. Do I need to enter my bank details to subscribe to a free trial?
A: No, you don’t need to enter your bank details to use the free trial. Simply subscribe and start your experience!
Q. Do I need to download or install anything to use Binary Management?
A: No, there is no need to download or install anything to your computer. Everything is online to save your space.
Q. How to go from a trial to a paid solution?
A: At the end of your free trial, your working space will stay preserved for you to choose the plan and continue on paid basis. You can sign in and select a plan to purchase or contact us if you need more time to evaluate the software.
Q. Is it possible to cancel my subscription?
A: Yes, you can cancel your subscription any time you want. If you already paid for a year, your subscription will be terminated on the first day of the next month after you expressed your decision to cancel. You will get a reimbursement for the unused months. If you pay monthly, there will be no reimbursement for the unused days.
Q. Is there an additional fee for extra users?
A: Yes, there is a fee of $10 per person in all plans except for the Individual plan.
Q. Is it possible to add or remove users in the middle of the month/year?
A: Yes, you can add or remove users in the middle of the month or year. If you add new users, you will start paying for them on the first day of the upcoming month. If you remove users, you will stop paying for them on the first day of the upcoming month.
Q. Is it possible to add more users than my plan allows?
A: No, if you want to add more users than your plan allows, you will have to upgrade to a different plan. For example, if you are on Team package but want to have more than 50 users, you will have to upgrade to Enterprise package.
Q. Can I use Binary Management if I am an individual designer?
A: Absolutely! BM has a special plan for individual designers.
Q. I am a teacher or a student. Can I use Binary Management?
A: At Binary Management, we strive to support aspiring designers and passionate teachers. If you teach or study Interior Design, you may qualify for our special offer. Check out our Teachers & Students page for more information.
Getting Started
Q. How to create an account?
A: To create an account, go to www.binarymanagement.com and click Try for Free. Enter your details – name, company, email and create your domain and password.
The domain you create will be used by all your team members. Typically, it is the name of the company. For example, if your company name is Victoria Interiors, you can make a domain victoriainteriors, and your workspace will be at victoriainteriors.binarymanagement.com
Confirm your email and log in to your personal account.
Q. What is the domain and how to create one?
A: The domain you create will be used by all your team members. Typically, it is the name of the company. For example, if your company name is Victoria Interiors, you can make a domain victoriainteriors, and your workspace will be at victoriainteriors.binarymanagement.com
You will be asked to create the domain when creating your account.
Q. How to get to my account once it’s created?
A: If you remember the domain that you created when setting up your account, type that in your browser, then type .binarymanagement.com (the address of your installation is ourdomain.binarymanagement.com).
If you do not remember your domain, just go to www.binarymanagement.com and click Sign In. You will find a link to your installation in your account.
Q. What does my installation consist of?
A: Your workspace consists of five main parts – costing, planning, tracking, reporting and administration. Administration block helps you to manage your team members and dictionaries.
Administration and Team
Q. What is BM Administration and who has access to it?
A: BM Administration is the place to manage team members and key values for your studio. Only superusers and administrators have access to Administration.
Administration consists of User Management and Dictionaries Management. User Management is the place where new team members can be invited, their profiles can be edited, salaries can be set. In dictionaries management, you can set some fundamental values for your future work.
Q. What can an Administrator do?
A: An Administrator can invite new team members, edit their profile, set their salary and edit dictionaries.
Q. What are the BM Dictionaries?
A: In BM Dictionaries, you can set some fundamental values for your future work. Most of the dictionaries are built into the system for your convenience and cannot be edited or seen by users. BM is flexible, so some of the values can be changed. For example, you can add your custom user position. If you see that the system lacks a position or anything else that you need, simply add it in the dictionaries.
Q. What are the global roles in BM?
A: There are three possible roles in the system. There is a superuser who has all the rights in the installation like viewing reports and tracking progress. There is an administrator who can edit dictionaries and set salaries. There are users who work on their tasks and report their progress.
Q. How do I add my team members?
A: Go to Administration and choose User Management. To add a user, enter their email. They will receive an invitation. Edit their profile, set their salary and activate their account so they appear in the system.
Q. Can I work alone?
A: Yes, you can work on your projects individually.
Projects
Q. How many projects can I have simultaneously in BM?
A: BM allows you to work on as many projects as you need. Choose an appropriate package to meet your needs.
Q. How to create a project?
A: To create a project, go to Costing. There, you can see a list of all your projects. Create a new project by entering its name and type. Please note that you will not be able to change the project type once it’s set.
Enter some general information about your project, select necessary stages, add rooms, enter financial and contact information. Activate the project.
Q. What is a project type and what should I know about it?
A: Different project types can be set in Dictionaries Management. You should know that once you set the type for your project, you won’t be able to change it later.
Q. What are the stages, and can they be changed?
A: The stages are steps in the process. When creating a project, you will select the stages where your company will take part in. The stages will be predetermined by the system for your convenience. They will be based on the information that you provide. You can always change the stages in the Dictionaries Management.
Q. How to add rooms to the project?
A: You can add rooms to your project in Costing. Set a name, quality, category and type for each room.
Q. How to add deliverables to the project?
A: Once you choose the stages where your company will participate in and when you add the rooms for the project, BM will automatically generate the deliverables for each room and stages. You don’t have to enter all of them manually, BM does it for you!
If needed, you can add your own deliverables, edit or delete the ones suggested by the system.
Q. Where do deliverables in BM come from?
A: All the deliverables in the system are based on professional design standards and come from years of experience of thousands of the best interior design firms.
Q. How is costing done in BM?
A: In costing, you will select the stages, add rooms, enter financial information – interior fitout budget, FF&E budget, procurement fee, margin and contingency. All this data will be used by the system to automatically generate the design costs accounting for all the risks.
Q. What statuses can a project have?
A: Your project can be Pending, Active or Lost. Please note that you can only change the status of the project to Active when there are deliverables in the project.
Q. Is there a payment schedule?
A: BM has a payment schedule that you can view and edit.
Q. How to generate a project design fee?
A: With basic project information such as design scope, built up area, number of rooms, quality & priority of rooms and start dates you can generate a project design fee with ease.
Q. What are BM design templates?
A: BM’s imbedded design templates produce the overall required efforts to complete the design job, broken down into stages or deliverables.
Planning
Q. How to assign employees to the project?
A: To assign employees to the project, go to Planning and choose the project you want to plan for. Go to project team and assign your employees to different stages of the project. Set roles and time.
Q. What project roles are there in BM?
A: There are two project roles in BM – team lead and assignee. There can only be one team lead in a project.
Q. How do I plan my team and time if I have multiple projects going on?
A: BM easily presents all your projects’ resources within the single interface to make your planning choices accurate and efficient.
Q. Is it possible to move team members between projects or fast-track a stage?
A: BM gives you so much flexibility to react to unknown situations – designers can be shifted from one project to another or if a client requests fast-tracking through a certain stage, it can be forecast immediately. You can give your client full confidence about your ability to deliver as per their new goals.
Q. How to make sure I meet the deadlines?
A: According to the role within the plan, each designer has tasks that have to be completed. BM prioritizes these tasks for you and highlights them on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. BM also shows you the allowances for time to complete these deliverables.
Tracking
Q. How to assign employees to tasks?
A: To assign employees to tasks, go to Tracking. In Deliverables, you can view and edit tasks. Select a project, choose a deliverable and choose an assignee.
Q. How can I track progress?
A: Go to Tracking. Time Tracking tab allows you to view each employee’s progress by day. Program tab shows you project progress by quarters, weeks or days.
At the level of the individual user, each design team member can monitor their delivery and deadlines through their personal calendar and with a simple click of a button notify their team leaders of their achievements for a specific task or for certain time duration.
Q. What to do if there are deviances from the planning stage?
A: The time tracking component highlights any deviances from the planning stage and provides immediate decision support information to the user.
Reporting
Q. Why is reporting in BM so unique?
A: Binary Management is a unique tool as it allows you to see Reporting in three graphs – Contract plan, Base plan and Actual plan. This way, you can evaluate your planning and make reasonable conclusions. You can review your full financial report and employee heatmap for every project.
Viewing any project as a whole and experiencing how it unfolds is no longer a surprise to those involved. Realtime status of deliverables and their respective deadline dates cannot be misunderstood, with any potential red flags objectively reported.
Transparent profitability on a project or operational level is immediate and is reconciled at the end of each business day. This ability gives owners and operational leaders a clear picture of the project or the company in the “Here and Now” and not at the end of any design process. Surprises and losses can totally be avoided. No more inaccurate company performance projections.
With BM’s key performance dashboard, owners or executives can analyze their company’s individual project performance and take steps to further optimize their own design delivery approach and profitability. This optimization can be introduced into BM’s templates as the new standard for any ensuing design delivery.