There must be a better way of doing this! (part 1)

Some of us (maybe many) who are in consulting businesses struggle so much with timesheets to a point that we do not want to deal with them anymore.

At the same time we realize this time tracking on projects is a significant part of running a consulting or design firm. Simply because we often get paid based on the billable time we put into a project.

We all can do marvelous and expensive designs, but they will mean little if those hours we spent are not properly billed. We know that having accurate and timely created timesheets are crucial to the profitability of a business.

At my old company we had a lady who spent more than half of her time on weekly basis dealing with timesheets, expenses and entering them into the accounting database. It seemed that the time tracking system we used -which was based on spreadsheet- was part of the problem. It was prone to errors and mixed up since every item needed to be entered manually. And it was not automatically integrated with the accounting database which created another opening for human errors. I did not have good experience with it.

In general it takes quite a bit of effort from everyone before invoices can be sent out: starting from filling out a timesheet everyday and get it reviewed by managers, then the accounting department needs to go through it one more time before creating invoices.

I always thought: "There must be a better way of doing this!"

When I started running my own small firm, I made conscious efforts to improve my time tracking system. I figured I had to do this given that I have limited resources and time to back check everything or, worse, bear the impact of lost billing. My idea was that every billable hour and expense should be properly allocated and every invoice that goes out the door needs to be correct. I wanted a system that allow me at the end year to review my performance in term of hours and money spent for the business. The software should also be accessible from anywhere; I don't have to be in the office to enter my hours. In other words, it should allow me to work on it in the kitchen while heating up dinner, for example.

After doing some online research, I found that many large consulting firms employ so called web based time tracking softwares.

They will break

There have been almost daily newspapers reports on broken or breached levees during this ongoing Midwest floods that brought many small towns along the Mississippi river underwater.

I have been following the news and my reaction was "It happened before in 1993, didn't the government learn something?"
It was easy for me to be skeptic about the work of FEMA and other federal agencies particularly after their slow response during the hurricane Katrina. Some of the flood victims recently interviewed by the New York Times echoed this sentiment. In fact, they did not expect any help would come from the government in rebuilding their homes given the seemingly complex bureaucracies.

What I learned was that newspapers reporting can be one-sided. They often focus on what or who to be blamed for these people's miseries. Why did the levees break? How did they spend our tax dollars?

The truth is many thousands of these levees are old and have never been inspected since the 1960s. Their status was not well understood according to FEMA report in 2006 titled "The National Levee Challenge". Many are substandard, too low and were originally designed to protect farmlands. No inventory of levees and related floor control structures are available at state or federal level. Not even here in the King County where there are more than 500 levees according to Washington State Department of Ecology.

The FEMA report also says that more than forty percent of the U.S. population lives in counties with levees. So it is pretty clear that flood is a big threat. It will get bigger as the increasing populations put more pressure on greenfield developments. This levee issue must be dealt at every level of government starting with the local. And it is not fair to expect FEMA to check the quality and capability of every levee and floodwalls. They will never given the budget to do that either.

By the same token, homeowners should be more proactive in understanding the situation they are in. I believe it is their responsibility to find out if their house is in a floodplain. If in doubt, get a flood insurance or move to higher ground! Because you can't count on the levees. There is a good chance that they will break.