Automations, Integrations, and Other Wizardry: Advanced ClickUp Use Cases for Agencies

Running an agency is harder than ever before. With clients demanding more for less, you need to squeeze every ounce of efficiency from your team. The right workflows in ClickUp could be the difference between barely staying afloat and dominating your niche.

As one of ZenPilot’s marketers and storytellers, I’m constantly amazed at the way our ClickUp experts are able to push the platform to its limits.

One such expert is Alex Rizea, our Solutions Team Lead.

Alex and I first bonded over our shared passion for music; I play bass while he focuses more on the guitar.

But he’s had way bigger gigs than I’ve had.

I recently learned his band once opened for Behemoth! If you know your black metal, you know that’s a big deal.

But Alex is not just a musician I’m envious of; he’s also one of the biggest ClickUp brains in the world. A true ClickUp wizard.

So when we had Alex join me on a recent installment of the ZenPilot Live Show, I had to ask him to spill the secrets on some of his favorite advanced ClickUp workflows.

If you want to take your agency’s ClickUp usage to the next level and transform your operations, be sure to watch the full livestream recording to soak up all of Alex’s hard-won lessons:

 

For a summary and some additional commentary, read on.

Alex walked us through 5 game-changing use cases:

• How can you create automated client portals in ClickUp?
• Should you move all of your Slack communication to ClickUp?
• How do HubSpot, Google Drive, QuickBooks and other integrations boost workflows?
• How can external tools like Looker Studio augment ClickUp reporting?
• Can ClickUp replace specialized tools for implementing EOS?

If you’re looking to take your agency’s use of ClickUp to the next level and gain a competitive edge through better systems and capacity, Alex’s wisdom will give you a leg up on other agencies.

Let’s dive in and explore Alex’s top ClickUp secrets:

How can you create automated client portals in ClickUp?

One of the most frequent requests we get from agencies is how to share tasks with clients without overexposing data. As Alex explained, this is tricky with ClickUp’s limited native permission settings.

But Alex’s favorite solution is leveraging Make and its integrations to automatically mirror selected tasks into a separate client-facing space. Effectively, this creates twins of some or all of your tasks for a client, and the twins only include the information you want them to include.

As Alex put it: “You have your client services Space, whatever it is, and you don't bring clients there. That stays internal; only your team sees that. For your clients however, you can create a separate space which can have a similar hierarchy structure, but where you can [the level of detailed information] a notch down.”

With the right Make triggers, you can decide which parent tasks get copied over, omitting subtasks, comments, and other sensitive info. Custom fields, tags, and time tracking can be included or excluded as needed.

The automation ensures the client portal updates in real time, without any manual duplication of work. And yet the agency retains full control over what gets shown.

According to Alex, you can take this even further by adding elements like client request forms, project dashboards, and embedded reports. The possibilities are endless.

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How Can You Integrate Slack and ClickUp for Better Communication?

No discussion of ClickUp is complete without addressing how it compares to Slack for team communication.

Alex weighed in with a nuanced take:

“Obviously the ClickUp Chat is a feature inside a very broad platform. Slack is primarily a communication platform, so it's definitely more advanced. For most people, Slack works better, especially for client communication. I think the best of both worlds is integrating them to some extent.”

Read: ClickUp Communication Guide for Agencies

Rather than forcing your team to choose one or the other, Alex suggests integrating Slack and ClickUp to get the benefits of both tools.

Although the native Slack-ClickUp integration is limited, a creative solution involving Make can automatically mirror key Slack conversations into associated ClickUp tasks. This consolidates discussions while still allowing Slack's convenience for external clients.

With some thoughtful integration, your team can have seamless communication that bridges Slack and ClickUp. It’s a win-win if handled correctly.

How do HubSpot, Google Drive, QuickBooks and other integrations boost workflows?

Alex emphasized that integrations are crucial for tailoring ClickUp to each agency’s unique needs:

“Integrations are really the key to making the workflow your own, because having your project management in ClickUp is obviously very important as a start, but sometimes just that is not enough to [capture] your whole workflow.”

While native integrations like Slack have limits, Alex’s secret sauce is using Make to connect the dots:

“Once you hear the first time about something like Zapier or Make, your eyes open: ‘oh, that integrates with stuff; it can do something different than what you can do natively in that platform!’”

What kind of superpowers does Make add? Alex shared several examples:

• Syncing HubSpot deals into ClickUp to trigger new projects
• Creating client Google Drive folders from ClickUp when you sign a new deal
• Turning ClickUp Formulas into legitimate custom fields for reporting
• Automatically generating invoices from ClickUp time tracking

As Alex put it, “This comes very handy especially with invoicing and with costs. Like if you want to find out how much you should bill this client based on the number of hours tracked for them. (...) You can use Make to centralize things into one hard coded custom field.”

When you leverage Make to connect ClickUp into wider workflows, a whole new world of integrations within and outside of ClickUp opens up.

How can external tools augment ClickUp reporting?

Alex gave us an inside look at how he builds robust reporting using ClickUp along with a spreadsheet and Looker:

“What I like the most is when we bridge ClickUp data with integrations and with external reporting, for example wtih Looker Studio.”

Want to see this in action? Alex shared his screen at this timestamp in the video and conducted a walkthrough of reporting ClickUp data externally in Looker Studio.

While ClickUp dashboards have limits, Alex extracts key data into Google Sheets, carefully structuring it so Looker can visualize the metrics he needs.

Massaging the data from ClickUp lets him track things like:

• Percentage of tasks closed on time
• Percentage of tasks overdue
• Percentage of tasks without a due date
• Completion ratio, velocity ratio, and compliance ratio (read our full blog post: Agency Project Management - 3 Metrics You NEED to Be Measuring to Improve Performance)
• Estimated vs actual time per client

The Looker dashboards help identify issues and give insights not possible in ClickUp alone. Agencies can also leverage the approach to share interactive reports with clients.

It does require some spreadsheet finesse, but the payoff is huge.

Alternatively, you can always request a full workload visibility system from us—just book a call.

What does managing EOS in ClickUp look like?

Here at ZenPilot, we run almost our entire business on ClickUp—including implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS).

Alex explained why ClickUp is the perfect platform for EOS:

“EOS in ClickUp mainly is great because of Rocks and Issues—because it makes these things very actionable and relatable to your real work that's going on with project management.”

With a few folders and some custom fields, the core elements of EOS like Rocks, Issues, and the Accountability Chart can all be managed natively in ClickUp.

Alex shared how this centralization makes everything more connected:

“You can for example transform a real task in your workspace to an Issue, like: ‘okay, we've been working on this deliverable for this client, this is an issue, I want to talk about in our EOS weekly meeting, add it to the Issues list’. And there you can see all the context that has been going on and talk with your team about that.”

And managing Rocks and their dependent tasks is a breeze. ClickUp AI’s suggested tasks feature can even help your team plan out SMART rocks with less effort.

For any agency running EOS, implementing it in ClickUp is well worth considering.

Ready to Take Your Agency to the Next Level with ClickUp?

I learned so much from digging into these advanced examples with Alex. It’s amazing how much extra value you can get out of ClickUp with the right integrations and workflows.

So are you ready to take your agency’s use of ClickUp up a level and gain a true competitive advantage? Do these solutions excite you, but you need help implementing them effectively?

Then reach out! Here at ZenPilot, we eat, sleep, and breathe ClickUp.

We’ve done 2,700+ agency integrations, we’re ClickUp’s #1 Diamond Tier Solutions Partner, and we have some (most?) of the best ClickUp experts in the world in our roster.

Our experts like Alex can custom tailor the ultimate workflows for your agency using these same approaches and much more.

With our guidance, your agency can lock in the final project management system you’ll ever need—saving time, delighting clients, and pushing your agency to new heights.

Book a call with us here and get a detailed diagnosis of where your agency’s project management system could serve you so much better.

(Oh, and one last thing...if you want even more ClickUp wisdom straight from Alex, be sure to watch the full livestream recording.)