What is the best project/task management software for small business?

Basecamp is a good one. Also check out Liquid Planner, and Innotas.

A great integrated solution worth taking a look at is WORKetc. You would be able to manage all of your clients, leads, projects, to-dos, events, support issues, files, and even timesheets and billing if you need to.

It's great for small, remote teams, as you have one central, web based SaaS you can use to manage all operations and documents, data, etc. Tracking changes made to items is easy, and tracking correspondence between yourself and customers is simple and organized.

WORKetc is intuitive, yet powerful and integrates a lot into one system - which has great benefits for workflows and overall company efficiency. Communication between you and your team would be made much simpler, with projects becoming a lot easier to organize.

You can see WORKetc compared with other project management systems here: http://www.worketc.com/compare

Michael

Check out Aceproject.com.

I used AceProject off and on for the past 7 years for ERP project management. I also found it to be great for an alternative CRM, and personal task management. I consider it an excellent and affordable choice for web based project management. One drawback at the time was the inability to work with dependencies, which they may have improved upon.

AceProject.com is well worth the time to look into.

John Paulson

We went with SmartSheet, which is perfect for what we needed - not too fancy, no downtime on learning (if you know Excel) and exceptionally easy to run. I've been thrilled so far.

Wendy:

I have used Smartsheet as well on a few projects. You are right...easy to use. Has been easy to train non-technical project team members.

-Robert

I've been using Smartsheet for over a year ... simple yet very effective. I have BaseCamp since I subscribe to the full 37Signals suite of products and I prefer Smartsheet over BaseCamp.

Managing distributed teams can be quite a challenge. My team is spread across 3 states, so I’m quite familiar with what you are talking about. I tried several project management and/or collaboration software, and my choice is Wrike (www.wrike.com). We’ve been using it for 6 months and are totally satisfied. Actually, I think, it’s an ideal solution for such distributed teams as yours and mine. Wrike’s social networking features, that I absolutely love, make remote team collaboration amazingly seamless and thus efficient. It’s almost like a face-to face communication :) Interactive to-do emails and instant notifications about all updates allow my team always to be on one page. And the last but not the least, it’s very easy to add new team members as the team is growing.

Hey Wendy -

Also check out TaskShot (www.taskshot.com). I've been using it for over 6 months now and it seems to do the trick. It has fast task creation and prioritization, everything's sorted by project and staff member, and you can easily update status with 1 click. In regards to seeing what's being held up you can change the status from 'in progress' to 'on hold' and it will change colors, letting you know what needs input. Hope that helps!