- Agencies can leverage both Trello’s visual project management and SPP's client portal by connecting them through Zapier, creating a seamless workflow.
- Trello’s visual Kanban system with features like color-coded labels, checklists with progress percentages, and due date indicators makes it easy to track project status.
- While Trello has limitations like file size restrictions and limited free features, implementing a consistent closeout process, and regular data exports helps agencies capture valuable insights.
SPP’s order management system is brilliant, but some agencies are just emotionally attached to their Trello boards. Trello has earned its reputation as one of the top project management tools out there.
But here’s the thing: you don’t need to choose between SPP and Trello. The smartest agencies are using both by automating the connection between them.
Let me show you how you can use Trello for project management without losing the cool features Service Provider Pro has to offer.
Trello basics
If you’re running a marketing agency, managing multiple projects simultaneously is just part of the daily grind. Spreadsheets quickly become unwieldy, and those fancy project management tools often come with steep learning curves (and even steeper price tags). Enter Trello—the visual project management tool that strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and functionality.
What exactly is Trello?
At its core, Trello is a visual collaboration tool based on the Kanban methodology. Think of it as digital sticky notes that you can move across different stages of your workflow. Each project lives on a board, tasks are represented as cards, and these cards move through lists that represent your workflow stages.
For marketing agencies, this translates beautifully: you can create a board for each client, campaign, or internal department. The visual nature means you’ll never again hear “I didn’t know where we were with that project” from team members or clients.
Essential features you’ll use daily
Trello’s power comes from its surprisingly robust card system. What looks simple on the surface packs a punch when you dig in:
Checklists turn complex deliverables into manageable steps. Instead of creating separate cards for write blog post, design featured image, and optimize SEO, you can add these as checklist items within a single card. This keeps your board clean while still tracking all the necessary steps.
Due dates keep everyone accountable and provide a quick visual cue when deadlines are approaching. Trello automatically color-codes these as they get closer—yellow for approaching deadlines, red for overdue items. For agencies juggling multiple deliverables, this instant visual overview is invaluable.
Attachments eliminate the “where’s the latest version?” chaos. Upload files directly to cards or link to Google Drive and Dropbox. For agencies, this means no more digging through email chains to find that client brief or wondering if you’re working from the most current version of the asset.
Comments keep conversations in context. Instead of scattered Slack messages or emails, team discussions happen right on the card where the work is being done. This creates a valuable record of decisions and feedback that follows the task throughout its lifecycle.
Whether you’re creating a social media campaign or managing website development, these features ensure nothing falls through the cracks. The beauty is that your team doesn’t need extensive training—most pick up the basics within minutes.
Organizing work with labels and filters
When you’re running multiple projects across different clients, finding the right card quickly becomes essential. This is where Trello’s organizational tools shine:
Color-coded labels give you instant visual cues. Create labels for priorities (high/medium/low), content types (blog/social/email), or team members (designer/copywriter/strategist). With a quick glance, everyone can filter the noise and focus on what matters to them.
Search functionality helps you find anything in seconds. Trello’s powerful search can filter by label, member, due date, or keyword. Need to find all tasks assigned to your copywriter that are due this week? Two clicks and you’re there.
Power-Up integration expands Trello’s capabilities without complicating the interface. The Calendar view, for instance, transforms your cards into a timeline, perfect for planning content calendars or campaign schedules.
The best part? You can connect Trello to your client portal in SPP, keeping your internal workflows separate from client-facing communications while ensuring everything stays in sync. This means your team can work in Trello while clients interact through a branded portal experience.
Project implementation & monitoring
Once your Trello boards are set up, the real work begins. For marketing agencies, project implementation can easily go off track without proper monitoring. Let’s explore how Trello ensures your projects run smoothly from kickoff to delivery.
Tracking progress without micromanaging
Trello’s visual nature makes progress tracking intuitive for both team members and managers. Instead of constantly asking for updates, you can see exactly where things stand at a glance:
Checklists with percentages show completion rates for complex deliverables. For campaigns with multiple components (like social media graphics, ad copy, and landing pages) checklists provide a clear snapshot of progress without endless status meetings.
Moving cards across lists creates a visual flow of work. Many agencies set up lists for “Planning,” “In Progress,” “Review,” and “Complete.” This Kanban approach makes bottlenecks immediately visible. If too many cards are stuck in “Review,” you know exactly where to focus your attention.
Due date indicators change color as deadlines approach, giving you early warning when timelines are at risk. For agencies juggling multiple client deadlines, these visual alerts are invaluable for prioritizing work before anything becomes critically late.
Managing costs without complicated tools
While Trello doesn’t have built-in cost tracking like some expensive project management systems, savvy agencies have found creative ways to monitor budgets:
Custom fields can track hours allocated, hours used, or budget remaining. With the custom fields Power-Up, you can add these tracking elements directly to cards, giving project managers real-time visibility into resource utilization.
List naming conventions help manage cost expectations. Some agencies prefix lists with budget indicators like “$” for low, “$$” for medium, and “$$$” for high-investment deliverables. This creates an instant visual cue for where your resources are going.
Time tracking integrations like Clockify or Toggl connect directly to Trello cards. This allows team members to log time without switching tools, while giving managers accurate data on where hours are being spent.
For agencies using SPP alongside Trello, there’s an added benefit—you can maintain client billing and financial tracking in your client portal while keeping the day-to-day project work in Trello.
Communication that keeps everyone aligned
Perhaps Trello’s most underutilized feature for agencies is its robust communication capabilities. When used effectively, these tools can reduce meeting time and email volume while keeping everyone in the loop:
Card comments keep conversations contextual. Instead of hunting through email threads or chat logs, all discussions about a specific deliverable live directly on its card. For revisions or client feedback, this creates a clear audit trail that anyone can reference.
@mentions ensure the right people see important updates. When you need input from your copywriter on a design concept, a simple @mention sends them a notification while keeping the conversation visible to the whole team.
Attachments with preview eliminate version confusion. When you upload the latest iteration of a design or document, Trello displays a preview directly on the card. This means team members can quickly scan for changes without downloading files.
Activity logs provide transparency into who did what and when. For agencies managing multiple contributors, this accountability feature helps identify both process bottlenecks and star performers.
Many agencies also leverage Trello’s Power-Ups to add new communication features. The Slack integration, for example, automatically sends notifications to relevant channels when cards are moved or deadlines approach. This keeps remote teams synchronized without requiring constant check-ins.
Templates for project management in Trello
If you don't want to start from scratch, Trello has a template library with sample Trello boards for project management that you can access. One of those preset templates has been created by the Trello team.
For productized services though, you need a different board that better suits your order delivery flow–so we’ve created one for you to use. It follows the standard order statuses we use in SPP, and that are available by default when you create a workspace.
Feel free to use it, and adapt it to your own needs and order statuses.
Project closeout & reporting
Every successful agency knows that how you end a project is just as important as how you start it. Project closeout isn’t just about marking tasks complete—it’s about capturing insights, documenting successes, and setting the stage for future work.
Creating a repeatable closeout process
The best agencies don’t reinvent the wheel for every project they finish. Instead, they develop a consistent closeout system in Trello:
Archive lists instead of boards to maintain historical data. When a project wraps up, many agencies make the mistake of archiving the entire board. Instead, create a “Completed” list and move all finished cards there, then archive just that list when needed. This keeps your workspace clean while preserving valuable project history.
Closeout checklists ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Create a template card with standardized closeout steps: client approval confirmation, file handover, invoice status, feedback collection, and team debriefing. Attach this to every project so nothing gets missed, even when you’re rushing to start the next client work.
Labels for lessons learned help categorize insights for future reference. Create specific labels like “Process improvement,” “Client communication win,” or “Budget challenge.” These make it easy to find relevant examples when planning similar projects down the road.
Some agencies take this a step further by creating a dedicated “Project retrospective” board where they collect insights across all clients. This becomes an invaluable resource for onboarding new team members and continuously improving your processes.
Turning project data into valuable reports
While Trello wasn’t built as a reporting tool, creative agencies have found numerous ways to transform their board data into meaningful client and internal reports:
Butler automations can generate weekly progress summaries. Set up rules to automatically create a card that lists all completed tasks, upcoming deadlines, and blockers. This provides a consistent reporting format without manual effort.
Card covers and attachments make for visual project summaries. For design or content projects, use the final deliverables as card covers to create a visual portfolio of completed work. This makes for impressive client presentations with minimal extra effort.
Custom fields for KPIs allow you to track performance metrics directly on cards. For marketing campaigns, fields like “Leads generated,” “Conversion rate,” or “Engagement metrics” can be added to relevant cards, creating a direct connection between tasks and results.
For agencies using SPP alongside Trello, you can take advantage of both platforms’ strengths. Use Trello for the granular task tracking and SPP for client-facing reporting and invoicing. This ensures clients see polished, professional reports while your team maintains their preferred workflow tool.
Extracting actionable insights from projects
The true value of project data comes from analysis. Trello offers several ways to export and analyze your project information:
CSV export provides raw data for deeper analysis. With a few clicks, you can export your entire board to a spreadsheet format, allowing for custom filtering, sorting, and trend identification. This is particularly useful for analyzing time estimates versus actual completion times.
Power-Up integrations connect Trello to specialized reporting tools. Platforms like Dashcards or Time in Status can create visual reports showing how long cards spent in each stage of your workflow, helping identify process bottlenecks.
Board activity logs offer insights into team performance patterns. Review these logs to see when most of the work happens (are you a team of last-minute sprinters or steady marathoners?), who moves work forward most consistently, and where handoffs typically slow down.
Many agencies schedule quarterly reviews where they analyze data across all projects.
Look for patterns like:
which service types consistently go over budget or timeline
which team configurations deliver the smoothest projects
which clients require the most revisions or support
These insights help you refine your pricing, improve your processes, and even decide which types of clients to pursue or avoid.
5 limitations of Trello for project management
While Trello is a great free tool, there are certain limitations that you should be aware of.
Limited free features
The free version doesn’t include features such as the timeline, table, calendar, dashboard, or map. The timeline is a very good feature to get a better overview of a big Trello board because it’s not easy to see the big-picture.
Small upload file sizes
Another limitation is the small file upload size. Sharing 10MB-small files might not work depending on your productized service. Anyone dealing with audio and video files will need to share files externally, which makes it harder to keep track of files and manage access to them. Paid members benefit from a 250MB file size limit.
Compared to Trello, your SPP workspace allows you to upload files of up to 200MB. We can increase this limit if requested to up to 5GB. This is perfect for anyone sharing large files, such as podcast editing services or anyone dealing with video files, such as agencies selling video editing subscription services.
Inability to complete cards
For productized services specifically, not being able to mark cards as complete might be an issue. While you can archive cards, you might need to know that an order is complete so you can track the number of completed orders, and the time it took to get to that stage. For this to work in Trello, you need a “Complete” list where you can move all completed cards to. The problem is that this list will grow over time and clog up your Trello board. A workaround might be to set up an automation to archive cards automatically once moved to Complete.
With SPP, not only can you mark orders as complete, if you allow revisions, completed orders can automatically change the order status to a status called “Revision”. This isn’t as straightforward in Trello unless you set up an automation that moves the card when an invited member (your client) comments in a completed card.
Missing organizational features
SPP makes it easy to know exactly what you need to work on–simply assign an order to a team member. Managers can also get an overview of the currently assigned orders by viewing the “assigned orders” dashboard report.
This overview helps you get a better understanding of your team’s performance and if someone has too many orders to deal with.
Relies on power-ups
Trello’s Power-ups help this tool enrich its rather limited feature set, but this also makes it complicated for first-time users. As mentioned, due to the storage limits, your team might need to integrate with Dropbox or similar services.
If you’re hitting too many limitations, you’ll have to browse the Power-ups marketplace and add everything you need to make Trello work as a project management tool for your use-case.
How Zapier connects SPP with Trello
A Trello board allows users to create cards perfect for organizing and streamlining workflows. Each card is a vast compact space in which users can add comments, upload file attachments, create checklists, add labels and due dates, and more.
While users can create Trello cards themselves, automating Trello card creation saves time. This is where Zapier comes into play.
Zapier is a workflow automation tool that moves data between web apps automatically. It effectively enables our users to connect SPP to 1,000+ other web services, including Trello.
Zapier uses automated connections called Zaps to automate tasks and build workflows between apps without any coding. After integrating it with Service Provider Pro, our users can signal the start of a project just moments after a client places an order — without manually creating a Trello card.
Each Zap uses an action within an app as the Trigger. The trigger app provides information and triggers one Action (or several) to occur within other apps. The Zap sends the data to the designated app automatically, and this enables our users to extract and forward new order information to create Trello cards automatically.
Connecting SPP to Trello with Zapier
On your SPP dashboard, click on Settings → Integrations and go to Zapier settings. From here, you’ll see several Zap templates you can use.
Click the Use this Zap button next to where it says Create Trello cards for new orders in Service Provider PRO. This will prompt a new Zapier window to open.
Connect your Service Provider Pro workspace and your Trello account. Then, pick which Board and List you’d like to have the new card appear.
If you have a paid Zapier account, you can create a multi-step Zap to route the card creation to the correct list. For instance, an order that has the status Pending should be added to your Pending list in Trello, while Submitted orders in Submitted.
Free Zapier accounts don’t allow multi-step creations, so you might have to set up a Zap for each order status.
Next steps:
Set up a zap that changes the order status in SPP when you move a Trello card
Set up zaps that sync the messages between both platforms
Get Integration Help
Looking for custom solutions? See how our certified SPP experts can help you.
Closing thoughts
As you can see, when it comes to productizing services, SPP matches the features of Trello for project management closely. For most productized services, SPP has powerful features to get your orders delivered to your clients.
