Posted on

Define Time Management

What is time management? Easy question and Zach answers it! Your time needs to be managed so you know how much time is spent on each project, how to bill clients, how many hours spent on each task, etc.

Zach is the time tracking and project management geek who answers questions for you. Ask anything about timesheets, time management, or project management. You’ll get an answer.

In this case, time management is watching your project tasks and admin so your project doesn’t bonk. It’s paying attention and keeping your head in the game. It’s making sure your project doesn’t crash.

Posted on

Electrical Contractors Track Client Hours

Reward yourself, Sparky! Get an app that tells you your average job length, your effective billing rate, plus invoices clients. Plus has project proposals. Plus has timesheets for every employee.

Don’t let this shock you, but if you’re running an electrical contracting business, you need this information. This is how you trim costs and keep rates competitive. It’s not by watching all the other contractors in the biz; it’s by watching your own biz. How much are jobs costing you? How much are you bringing in? What effective billing rate are you making? What percentage are your electricians utilized, verses being paid?

Watch the video below, and decide if this is something your electrical contracting company can use. Then download the timesheet here.

Posted on

Sales and Marketing Management Consulting

The only real way to make sure you’re staying true to sales and marketing priorities is to track the time you spend with clients. Without a time tracker you’re only guessing. Here’s what happens: (scroll down for video)

You take the time to identify sales and marketing priorities. Good. You identify top clients. Excellent. And you set strategic products and services that benefit your organization. Wonderfully done. Great sales and marketing plan!

Now how are you tracking actual results against those priorities and strategies?

That’s where most sales and marketing professionals stop.

Truth is, they just don’t want the hassle of extra admin time to track their hours. So they really never know if their staying true to the plan, or wandering into secondary areas they explicitly hoped to stay out of. Track your client hours, and you’ll have the information to compare against your strategic plans.

Posted on

Track Time for Computer and Networks

My job is to maintain a computer network. Sometimes I get so frustrated with people breaking everything! But I love it and the network runs smoothly because I’m a rock star!

If it weren’t for me, and guys like me, there would be no network, except in research labs. We’re the guys that connect your servers to the web, connect your workstations to the servers, and install all your crazy apps. We make it happen.

And keep it all running.

We track our hours with Standard Time®. That’s where your client invoices come from. Those line items were tracked on an iPhone, sync’d with the cloud, verified on a desktop, and printed from the Web. I hooked all that up in an hour, and started tracking my time for you. ST has to be one of the best and easiest to use. Ask me about it some time. Maybe you can use it too.

Posted on

Web Developers Sling Code

My day yesterday:

  • 128 lines of CSS
  • 292 lines of PHP
  • 8 new files
  • 3 directories
  • and a little 302 redirect work in .htaccess

How do you remember all that? You can’t, because you can’t even remember what you ate last night for dinner.

That’s what a web developer’s time tracking app is for. Not only are you collecting enough information to bill your clients, you’re also collecting the various kinds of work you do. You’re documenting your work, which effectively creates a status report. Now your boss knows what you’re doing all night with your office light burning, and zillion red and blue LED’s glowing against dark office hallways. Pulling an all-nighter is the perfect reason for a good time tracking app. At least you’ll remember some of it the next afternoon when you wake up.

Posted on

How SEO Experts Track Time

SEO marketers, here’s a great way to track client billable hours. Use Standard Time®.

This little time tracking app will track client projects and write invoices. Try these steps:

  1. Set up a client, with their address and contact info
  2. Set up web seo projects you are doing for that client (as many unique projects as you want)
  3. Optionally add tasks you’ll complete while doing the projects
  4. Click or tap to start a timer
  5. Do the job
  6. Click or tap to stop the timer
  7. Collect up all your billable hours
  8. Invoice the client using date ranges or milestone billing

Do this for a few months and you’ll know exactly how much time you spend on each client. For some clients, you’ll be surprised. For others, you’ll just verify what you already believed.

Posted on

What Can Project Portfolios Do For You?

First off, what is a project portfolio? The video below answers this effectively. A project portfolio is just a collection of projects. It’s a “black box” filled with projects that relate to each other some way. You decide how they relate, or why they are bundled. Then you can work on the entire bundle.

The idea is that you can perform certain operations on an entire portfolio of projects rather than the individual projects themselves. Or course you can work with individual projects also. But portfolios give you a “black box” of projects that you can tinker with.

What can you do with portfolios? The video explains, but consider these possibilities.

  1. See resource allocation for an entire portfolio
  2. See revenue for a portfolio
  3. Run reports for a selected portfolio
  4. See historical time for a portfolio

Posted on

HR Needs a Vacation Tracker

People always take vacation, get sick, have personal time off, etc. How can you track all that time? Standard Time® has it built in!

Employees earn new hours for each of these reasons. ST does it automatically on a regular basis. You just set the PTO accrual rules and it keeps going week after week, month after month. New hours are automatically added to employee banks periodically.

Of course, employees can request time off any time. You can allow them to overdraft a certain number of hours, which they will earn again in the future.

Blackout periods can be set up to discourage or block time off during critical work days. Just add a new date blackout date range, and users will see a popup message when they try to take time off. Usually this acts as a friendly reminder that all employees are needed during this critical time.

All the necessary tools for PTO accruals and time off are provided in the timesheet. This should save your organization dozens or man hours per month.

Posted on

What is Your Effective Billing Rate?

Do you know how to calculate your effective billing rate? It’s pretty easy. Just divide your revenue by working hours. If you brought in $10,000 and worked worked 80 hours, your effective billing rate is $125.  Nice!

Scroll down for a video.

But if you brought in that same $10,000 but worked 80 hours on the project and 40 hours on secondary stuff, your effective billing rate is only $83. It’s that “secondary stuff” that kills you. We’re talking admin, email, Facebook, Twitter, hanging out, and goofing off. Of course, everyone has to goof off a little. We’re not machines. But still, it’s nice to know what we’re actually bringing in for every scheduled work hour.

The video below talks about finding your effective billing rate for a given time period, or for a certain project. That’s harder to do because you have to collect up all the revenue from time logs for that period, and divide that by scheduled hours. You probably need a good timesheet and project management app to do that.

Posted on

Project Proposals Earn More Business

Attractive project proposals can help you get new business. It’s not all just about the bling, but yes, potential clients judge you by their first impressions. The promptness of your initial contact… the content of your first reply… the voice they hear on the phone… the proposal or quotation you send.

This video may prompt you to step up those initial client proposals a notch.

Standard Time® has projects  with a win/loss setting, and a percentage of likeliness you’ll get the deal. You can send multiple proposals for a single project. And, you can look into the future for a glimpse of your possible revenue. That’s some cool stuff.