It doesn’t matter if you work within a conventional organisation or a virtual, collaborative venture at different locations, having a methodology that can accurately track time and fees is essential for the bottom line. In my days as a self employed consultant I have been as guilty as anyone is not tracking time and undercharging clients but this doesn’t help cash flow and when you are a small business cash flow is king.
Harking back to sustainability, one of the better services to emerge over the last 18 months or so is TimeXchange. It was one of the more exciting beta programs I watched because almost weekly you could watch the service grow in facilities and functionality. TimeXchange has grown in to a mature and robust pay for service which can easily manage substantial sized projects as well as the smaller SME-oriented requirements.
Logging in up front you see your dashboard which provides a summary, a contacts module and a master task list. From this front page you can also access four key modules – projects, times, expenses and reports.
Inside projects you can start a new project and track existing ones and there is even a timer to enable you to accurately track the amount of minutes and hours you spend on a task rather than what I suspect a lot of us do which is make an educated guess! Starting a new provides a wide range of options including the currency you will be charging in – there are 13 including the Polish Zloty and South African Rand – and whether the project involves one person or a team. Next you move onto the charging options which comprise cost rate, charge rate and the amount of hours set aside for the project. None of this information is set in tablets of stone and can be revisited later. Other options include the choice of time sheet or time card, the task options allocated to the project
The time module is pretty explanatory in allowing you to monitor the time spent on various tasks within the project and a weekly summary with time sheet or time card analysis. Similarly the expenses modules allows you to track costs against things like mileage, accommodation, flights, hotels, etc. Last, the report function allows you to run weekly timesheet, resource, detail and ad hoc project reports. Report data can be exported to link in with Quickbooks and allocated to a client account or into a Sure payroll function.
Knowing TimeXchange more functionality and facilities will be offered which makes $39.95 for a year’s use a highly cost-effective way of keeping track of time and costs. There is a one project free trial option to allow you to try out TimeXchange and make sure that it works the way you want it to. Personally I would have charged on a scalable level, ie $40 for up to 10 collaborators, and so on; $40 for unlimited resources is an exceptional deal.
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