Capturing Time on the Run

In our “mobile” society, being able to keep track of everything you do while “on the go” has become increasingly important. This is especially true for mobile professionals who need to bill for – or at least accurately track – all of their professional time. Various “remote entry” products and tools have been around for a while, but typically require some form of “export/import” routines to get the “mobile” data into the Timeslips billing system, which can prove daunting when everything doesn’t go completely smoothly (does it ever?).

We have recently become acquainted with a clever little product which seems to take most of the “heavy lifting” out of mobile time tracking, and runs right from your smartphone (Blackberry, iPhone, Droid, etc.). WorkTRAKR, from Proximiti Communications, installs right on your phone and runs in the background, waiting for you to make a call, send an email, or schedule an appointment. When you do so, you can choose to be prompted for a billing code, and the transaction is then automatically loaded onto a secure server at Proximiti, from where it can be quickly and easily merged into your Timeslips billing system, typically with a single click from the website portal.

The app runs not only on smartphones, but right on your desktop or laptop, as well, capturing information from Outlook, office copiers, landline phones, etc. – any tool you use for communication (except a typewriter!) is fair game to be integrated for time and expense capturing purposes to bill from Timeslips. The application is sold as a service, allowing the user to “tailor” what communications applications are to be integrated, and is priced accordingly.  A basic subscription for smartphone-only integration can be as inexpensive as $25.00 per month.

There is a link on our website from which you can explore the various pricing options, receive a ready-made quote for the services you elect to purchase, and even try out the service for 30 days at no cost. Click here if you are interested in taking WorkTRAKR for a test drive.

Paperless Time and Billing Tasks

In this environmentally conscious era, everyone seems to be talking about the paperless office.  Timeslips 2010 now has many features that make it easy to manage your billing process from start to finish without having to print a thing.   Let’s take a look at the “old way” of doing things, with piles of paper, and then look at the features in Timeslips that make it easier than ever to perform the same functions in a paperless environment. 

Time Entry
The old way: Timekeepers fill out paper timesheets and hand them to an assistant to enter into the computer. 

The paperless solution:  Timesheet Slip Entry.

Timekeepers can now enter their time in a traditional timesheet format, instead of having to enter individual slips.  Clients and tasks can be pre-filled so that the timekeepers need only to enter the number of hours worked in the appropriate box.  They can make life even easier by using the timer to keep track of the time as they work. 

 Pre-Bill Worksheets
The old way:  The billing clerk prints out a stack of pre-bill worksheets and then gives them to the boss to review and mark up before the final bills are generated.  

The paperless solution:  Interactive bill preview with drill-down capability

The boss can print the pre-bills to his/her display and click on-screen to drill down and make the changes right in the program. 

 Billing
The old way: Print out the bills.  Stuff them in envelopes.  Stamp the envelopes.  Put them in the mail.  Wait a week for the client to receive the bill and another week (hah!) for them to pay. 

The paperless solution:  Send bills via email

Timeslips allows you to email bills right from within the program, via a connection to Outlook.  The client receives the bill as a PDF file.  You can create an unlimited number of email templates with different message bodies and subject lines.  You can even embed tokens like the invoice number and amount into the message and subject line.     If you prefer, you can also print the bills to PDF files and then email them manually. 

 Reporting/Data Analysis
The old way: Print reports to paper

The paperless solution:  Print reports to display, PDF file, Excel or Word

The added bonus to viewing your reports on screen is that you can click on the data elements to drill down for more detail.  Sending reports to Excel gives you extra functionality and flexibility.  With Timeslips 2010, all reports now have a print to Excel option and you can choose to send the data over in columns, or as it appears in the standard Timeslips report format. 

Cash Receipts
The old way: Open the mail. Enter checks into Timeslips.  Take checks to the bank. 

 The paperless solution:  Unfortunately Timeslips has not yet developed a way to receive payments other than to enter them manually.  However, there are many ways that you can receive payments from clients over the internet or phone without using checks.  We would be willing to bet that, before too much longer (Timeslips 2011?) Timeslips will incorporate a way to import payment transactions from the website, that you can then use to process client payments. 

 So there you have it.  Not only do these solutions save paper, they save time, resources and money.

For more help with configuring Timeslips for a paperless office, contact one of the experts at TriStar Data Systems.

Deciphering Timeslips Interest Calculations

Many of our clients that use the “Finance Charge/Interest”  feature in Timeslips have found it confusing. We have been asked for advice about Timeslips interest calculations on several occasions.  It took me a while to completely understand how it works myself, so I figured it was a good topic to discuss in this space.  The new and improved Billing Assistant in Timeslips 2010 gives a much clearer breakdown of how interest charges are calculated, but I will attempt to clarify it a little further.   

First let’s look at the initial interest setup.  Interest is configured for each client on the Arrangement 2 page, where there are five fields that relate to interest:

Annual Interest Rate.  This is typically set to 18%, which equates to 1.5% per month or .049315% per day.  Despite the fact that you are choosing an annual interest rate here, interest is actually calculated by the day.  This is an important point to remember. 

Type of Interest.  You can choose Simple or Compound.  Simple means that interest is only charged on the original invoice amount.  Compound means that interest is charged on the interest.  Once this is set and an invoice is generated, it cannot be changed for that invoice. 

Charge Interest At.  The choices here are determined by how you’ve configured your aging periods.  Typically this will be 30, 60, 90 and 120 (in days).   Interest will begin calculating after the number of days you select here. 

Grace Period.  This tends to be the most confusing field.  The choices on the dropdown menu are also determined by how you’ve configured your aging periods, but here you can type in a value that’s not on the list.  This number represents how many days NOT to charge interest for.  For example, let’s say you generated a bill on 9/30 and have interest set to charge at 30 days.  A month has gone by and the client has not paid, and now it’s time to generate the October bills on 10/31.  31 days have gone by since the first bill went out on 9/30.  If you have set the grace period to 0, 31 days worth of interest will be charged.  If you set a grace period of 5 days, only 26 days of interest would be charged.  If you set a grace period of 30 days, only one day of interest would be charged.  If you look at the Days Due/Days Per Year calculation in the Billing Assistant you will see that the grace period essentially moves the original invoice date later by the specified number of days.  In this example, with the grace period set to 5 days, it shows the original invoice date as 10/5, even though the bill was actually created on 9/30. 

Last Bill Date.  This field should only be filled in if you are setting up a client that you have already billed outside of Timeslips.  Each time you generate a bill through Timeslips this field will be automatically updated to reflect the date of the last bill.   

 Let’s continue to follow the previous example through a little further, to see how the interest charges would be affected in subsequent months if the client still hadn’t paid anything (not that we ever have these kinds of clients ourselves).   We’ll use compound interest for this example. 

On 9/30 we generated a bill for $1000 in fees. 

On 10/31 we billed another $1000 in fees, but added on $12.82 in interest from the previous bill:

           $1000.00 from 9/30 invoice
x                 26 days overdue (31 actual days minus the 5 day grace period)
 x   0.00049315 daily interest rate
               $12.82

So the total amount of the new bill is $1012.82. 

 On 11/30 the first bill (from 9/30) has now accumulated another 30 days of interest.  The grace period is no longer in play for that invoice so the calculation would be as follows:

          $1000.00 from 9/30 invoice
x                 30 days since the last invoice
x   0.00049315 daily interest rate
             $14.79

The grace period is still in play for the 10/31 invoice since this is the first time we are charging interest on it.  The calculation would be as follows:  Note: If we were using simple interest we would charge interest on only $1000 from the 10/31 invoice and not the $12.82 in interest. 

       $1012.82 from 10/31 invoice
x                 25 days overdue (30 actual days minus the 5 day grace period)
x  0.00049315 daily interest rate
           $12.49

So the total interest charged on 11/30 comes to $27.28.  

 Hopefully this will help you to decide how you want to handle charging interest and how to explain the charges to your clients when they inevitably ask you to explain how you came up with the amounts. 

 Discount pricing is still available for Timeslips 2010 upgrades until the end of the year.  Timeslips versions 2007 and below are no longer supported by Sage software.   And interest charges are a whole lot easier to figure out and manage in Timeslips 2010!

Timeslips Speeds up the Billing Engine

One of the major areas of improvement touted for Timeslips 2010 is the presence of a new and improved billing engine.   That sounds nice, but how much faster could it really be?  I decided to take it for a test drive so I can give potential upgraders some hard data. 

I have a client using Timeslips 2008 that is very frustrated by how long it takes to print bills – typically around two hours just for the printing stage, before approval.  I created a copy of their database and decided to do a comparison.  I no longer have Timeslips 2008 on my system, so I ran the first test in Timeslips 2009.  The only filter I used was slip date, which I limited to the month of June.  There were 2042 open clients so I printed to a PDF file in order to conserve paper.  Bills were generated for 912 clients, and the process took an hour and 45 minutes.  It then took another 3 hours to approve the bills.  I could see why my client was frustrated. 

The next day I took the original Timeslips 2009 database, created before I generated the bills, and converted it to Timeslips 2010.  I then generated the same batch of bills, and it only took 7 minutes.  7 minutes!  That is some improvement.  Kudos to the Sage development team. 

Unfortunately, it still took 3 hours to approve the bills, so there is some further improvement to be done on that side of things.  The billing process has gone from over 5 hours to around 3, though, so that is a pretty significant upgrade. 

Do you feel the need for speed?  TriStar is currently offering significant discounts on Timeslips 2010, so order your upgrade today.