As a business owner with multiple clients and employees I've researched and used many different time tracking and invoicing solutions. My business is built around billing clients an hourly rate for work our employees have or will perform. The vast majority of time tracking and invoicing software available today does not fit my business model. While many of the solutions out there can be forced or hacked to be somewhat serviceable, there is a dearth of products actually meeting this fairly basic functional need.Let me back up and explain the basics of how my business works (I'm sure of many other companies are in the same boat). We offer outsourced virtual assistants to clients all over the world. We bill at a flat hourly rate, say $10/hr, for a set amount of time, lets say 20 hours, so a total of $200. With some clients we bill before the work is done, some after the fact. Some are one time jobs, others are on going. Some clients are billed on a specific date (example, the 1st of the month).What I need is a time tracking system that can relate an hourly rate to the amount of hours each employee logs. It also needs to be able to keep track of account balances, and let me know when they reach a pre-determined level. I also need to be able to send an invoice for a specified amount that will update the account balance when marked paid. I would also like to option to invoice for items that are not related to an hourly rate (lets call these flat rate items).
As an example of what I'm talking about lets consider my virtual assistant business and my example used earlier. I've billed a client $200 for 20 hours to be worked in the future. As the employee assigned to this client completes a 3 hour work session I should see the client's account balance go down from $200 to $170. I can preset a feature where when the balance reaches $0, I'm alerted that this client needs to be billed again. On the invoice I create I can add a non-hourly line item, which will not affect the clients hourly account balance.The problem with most time tracking/invoicing tools out there is they are so project management focused that doing these simple items in the example above become overly complicated. Many of these tools have clients, and under them, projects, under projects there are tasks, under tasks there are modules and milestones, and so on...These project management tools are ideal if you are doing a complex, one-off, complicated job, like building a website, or customizing a CRM platform, but if you need something that is simple time tracking for ongoing projects being billed at a flat hourly rate, they leave much to be desired.The cost associated with these more complex solutions is also much higher than a small business may deem worthwhile for what they actually are using the product for.
The project management tool picks the tasks and time spent, and all you have to do is click generate and send the invoice.
ReplyDeletepopular project management software