Those apps that are put on your phone/computer are soooo annoying! But not Standard Time®, engineers love it!
Quick Questions: PTO Accrual Policies
HR offices manage PTO and vacation tracking. And that is huge! Think about it… for every employee, there are banks for hours for every kind of time off they can take. Vacation, sick, person, training, bereavement, maternity. Gosh, the list goes on and on.
And for each kind of time off (for each employee) you have to manage the rules that govern the hours they earn, and if those hours are different for year 1 and year 5, and if those hours are reset to zero each year, or if employees can carry over hours into the new year, and if they can overdraft on a certain type of time off. Again… the list of choices goes on and on.
So why not automate it? (watch the video below to see how)
There are tools that automate the entire PTO vacation tracking thing. You set the policies that govern each kind of time off for each employee. And you set the hours available to each employee for each reason.
Then let the whole thing run by itself. Sweetness and love. 
Quick Questions: Project Triangles
A project has three demands, no four; time, cost, scope and quality. The Standard Time® triangle can help you keep all those demands on track.
Quick Questions: Timesheet on a Tablet
A $200 Walmart tablet is all you need to track projects. This video demonstrates. Just pop off the keyboard and start entering project hours.
scroll down for the video
The video shows both a Windows app and a cloud time tracking app in use. Both look and feel fantastic. Tap and scroll with your finger, and enter time and expenses with a pop-up virtual keyboard.
The most common use for a system like this is freelancers, consultants, field workers, and support techs. But sales and other road warriors can also benefit. Imagine tracking your clients and time on the same tablet. You could record customer visits plus the time you spent with them. Or the time you spend on the road. Or the mileage and vehicles. Or all of the above.
You’ll see a list of all your clients and client-projects. For each project, you can have a complete list of tasks to track time to. Tap a button to start a timer. Tap again to stop. The complete time is recorded in your weekly timesheet. You’ll see daily totals, weekly totals, and a graphical block view of every time entry. Invoice clients and run reports, right on the tablet.
That’s a lot of awesomeness for $200.
Animated: Why Consultants use Standard Time
Consultants can use Standard Time® for their business. It is a great tool for client invoicing, task lists, project management, graphical timesheets. Use Android or iOS for the road and many other features. Check it out!
Consulting is a precise business. Customers must be happy, or they won’t come back for more. Rates must be reasonable and appropriate. And projects must be managed so status is always available for customers.
That is why consultants love Standard Time.
It does all these things without complaint.
Whiteboard: Customer Login and App
Is the client asking again? What’s the project status? What tasks are you working on? Is that big task complete? How about the other one? Do you think you can finish by July? No? How about August. September?
Every day, since January!
Why not let the client check project status without asking. The following video shows how.
There are two ways: 1. Let the client log into your project portal. They will see every project you’re doing for them, and the current status. They will see every time log and expense logged to a selected project. And 2. Let the client download ProjectBot from the Google Play Store. They can see all the same status down on their phones.
Consulting Software
If you’re a freelancer or consultant, you’re in the right place. The video below is for you. It demo’s some great software for time tracking and project management that we all use in the consulting biz.
Scroll down to view it.
Consulting can be a fun business, especially if you’re solving difficult problems and producing something of lasting value. Consulting is good honest work, and you should be proud to one.
But what software are you using? Because that can change the whole universe for you.
Consulting requires software the following disciplines. So, what are you using? Is it working?
- Time tracking
- PTO tracking
- Client invoicing
- Project management
- Client management
- Relationship management
- Employee management
See how the software below can do those things for you, and make consulting fun again.
QuickBooks Integration
This video will show you how to integrate QuickBooks with Standard Time®.
Standard Time is a project tracker. Track time to clients and jobs, and then send those hours to QB for invoicing and payroll. But once you’ve sent those hours over to QuickBooks, consider all the other project charts and reports you can get from ST.
- Project revenue chart
- Resource allocation and employee availability charts
- Project triangles
- Employee status
- Hours and overtime
- Project history
Time Off Calendar
When taking time off work to take the family on vacation you will need to get that time off approved. Standard Time® allows you to see other coworkers time off schedule, holiday time and company day’s off.
Why is it important to see coworker’s time off? (watch the informative video below)
So you can make sure the whole department doesn’t leave on the same day. Somebody has to man the fort. Not only can you see how many others will take time off, you can see the meetings you will miss. Most of those are a welcomed break, but some may be important.
Here is the lifespan of a time off request:
- Employee submits request for time off
- Email is sent to manager
- Manager reviews and approves
- Hours are subtracted from employee bank
- Employee optionally modifies the request
- The hours are put back into the bank
- An email is sent to manager again
- Manager re-approves
- New hours are subtracted from employee bank
- Email is automatically sent to employee notifying them of new approval
- Employee takes the actual time off
Quick Questions: Categories for Time Tracking
Define the kinds of work you do with customizable lists. The items in this list are called Categories.
So what good are categories for time tracking? (the video below tells, or read on…)
Categories break your work down to the basics. How much time do your project team spend on design work? Development? Testing? Sales? Meetings? Categories can tell you that.
It doesn’t matter which projects you worked on. It doesn’t matter which client or task. For now, you just care about how much time is spent on each type of work. Do you spend more than 10% on admin? More than 5% on meetings? Notice that those things are not project related. How about more than 25% on design? Or 50% on development. Those items are project related, but you don’t care which project. You just want to know how much time is spent on the basic activity.
Assign categories to project tasks, and you will instantly know these breakdowns. You can even get a pie chart that shows the breakdown. That would probably be interesting to know!