Free task management software — and where tasks meet stock

The key facts

• Free task tools are real: boards, lists and assignments for small teams, free-tier or open source — this page recommends them honestly.
• Tasks ≠ stock: a task tool holds who-does-what; it cannot hold quantities, movements, guardrails or order states.
• The seam: task tools run the work; an operations record runs the materials and promises — businesses past a certain volume need both.
• BSimple's boundary: not a task manager — the operations record ($180/mo AUD up, trial) with projects for installed assets, stated plainly.
• Context: the full inventory system holds the wider system, this page one stop in it.

What free task management tools actually do

Task management software keeps the work record: boards and lists of who does what by when, with assignments, checklists, comments and due dates. Free tiers of the major tools are genuinely usable for small teams, and open-source options suit self-hosters — for coordinating jobs, launches and renovations, the free route is legitimate and this page will not talk it down. The sibling page on project management covers the timeline-heavy end, and the broader free-software map places task tools among the other free categories.

What task tools cannot hold is the other small-business truth: quantities and orders. A card saying "assemble 40 units" knows nothing about whether 40 exist, what was consumed by the last assembly, or what to reorder. The tasks-versus-operations distinction is where the two tool types part ways.

Where tasks meet stock — the seam that matters

Jobs that consume materials need both records talking to the same reality: the task says assemble the order, the record says these quantities exist, those were consumed, this needs reordering. When one tool is asked to do both, the failure is predictable — task lists become de facto stock registers, quantities go stale, and the reorder decision is a guess. The healthy seam: the task tool runs the work; the operations record runs the materials and promises; people bridge them by keeping each truth where it belongs.

BSimple's projects layer sits exactly on this seam from the record side: installed assets and consumed parts grouped under a customer with lifetime history — the trade-installation pattern — while the work stays in whichever task tool the team uses. No formal integration with specific task tools is claimed; the seam is stated rather than implied.

BSimple's position, plainly

We build BSimple, so weigh that: it is not task management software — no boards, assignments or due dates. It is the operations record for wholesale, manufacturing, distribution and trade businesses: live multi-location quantities, batches, purchasing from demand, order-to-invoice, invoices pushed to Xero or MYOB (US integrations rolling out). Plans run $180/$250/$399 per month AUD with the trial as the full product. If the need is tasks, the free tools above are the honest answer; if the need is quantities and orders, the stage guide maps when the operations record earns its cost — and both tools coexist fine.