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.