The Hibiscus Dashboard
An operational hub for freelancers
What makes Hibiscus different from traditional project management platforms? A focus on making stuff (or as we like to call it, creating assets) and recognition that freelancers benefit from having a real-time snapshot of their personal business always at their fingertips.
When freelancers start work each morning — or in the middle of the night because freelancers don’t necessarily keep banker’s hours — what do they want to know? As a long time freelancer, I like to start the day (or night) with a high level understanding of just WTF is happening with my business…
Here stands Bob’s Ratburger dashboard in Hibiscus.
This is a sample Hibiscus dashboard for our imaginary friend Bob. He operates a sole proprietorship LLC called Ratburger. When Bob wakes up in the morning, he’s usually hungover and has little memory of what transpired the day before. Part of that’s the booze, part of it is that Bob has the attention span of a cat in a fan belt. Regardless, he greets each day much the same as Drew Barrymore in Fifty First Dates.
This sounds like a tough situation for Bob, but Hibiscus can help!
Our dashboard offers an uncluttered view of Bob’s operation. From left to right, Bob sees a list of active clients, stuck projects, active tasks, and open projects. If he’s curious about month-to-date revenue, that’s in the upper right!
If he’s unhappy with how the revenue picture in the upper right is looking, Boob needs to look no farther than the list of stuck projects. First up, a project called 2026-05 Paste Mixing. Why on earth is it stuck? Paste too thick or thin? Nope. There’s no active task associated with the project. In Hibiscus, any project not marked complete needs to have an open task lest it be considered a stuck project. To see how Bob resolved this issue and got the project unstuck, check out our handy dandy tutorial on stuck projects.
So with a little help from Hibiscus, Bob gets his projects unstuck by creating and completing tasks that will move assets (the stuff we make) to completion.
But not every stuck project is stuck because there’s no task associated with it. In Bob’s case, the project 2026-05 An Irregular Skidmark is behind schedule and stuck because Bob is late creating V2 of The Skidder. That’s apparent because the overdue task flashes red in his Active Tasks list.
Get to work, Bob! Finish that skidder!
Unlike legacy project and task management tools designed for large teams, Hibiscus was built to accommodate the individual or small agency that makes stuff and needs to keep track of multiple clients, projects, and tasks. Our dashboard is always up to date, always there, and always ready to help you stay organized and focused on the most urgent tasks and projects.