forum.datacad.com

Our office is looking into changing the way we keep track of our time spent on projects, and entering that information into the billing system to make things more efficient. Since most of you probably operate in a similar environment, with several clients that you spend time on during the month, I figure this is a good place to ask about how you do this.

Currently all employees calculate their hours semi-monthly and enter time on various projects into an Excel Spreadsheet which the office manager then uses to calculate billing in Quickbooks. Current system looks like this:
Employee>Excel> Office Mgr> Quickbooks

Does anyone know of a program that can automatically remind the employees to submit their time daily, and will take it directly to Quickbooks so we can eliminate the middle process, and the system looks more like this:
Employee >Quickbooks

One program we're looking at is called EZTime, but we have no experience with it yet. We may try its 2-week free trial. Deos anyone else have experience with this program?

Thanks.

C

I use a share-ware program called Time-to-Time that interfaces directly with Quickbooks. You can keep time wither with manual entries or a "running timer" that can be installed on the PC or on a PDA. Periodlically it can then "report" to QB the time/project/description, etc...to QB's time-and-costs semi-automatically.

It's fairly editable, and it can track employees and different time-rates and projects. I keep mine on an IPaq...you just have to remember to use it....and the synch the IPaq before opening up the administrative-portion of T-T to do the "reports". Once the accounts are set-up, I don't have to do any manual-entry unless I need to adjust things.

We have been using this web-based project management application for over a year now...their tech support is awesome and they encourage clients to ask for new features, suggest improvements, and give feedback.

www.psascorecard.com

You should also look at BillQuick (www.billquick.com). They have a LOT of Architectural firms (as well as attorneys and others) as their users, and it exports directly into Quickbooks. They offer a free trial (45 days, I think?) which would hopefully give you plenty of time to try it out.

Have you Tried using Quickbooks Payroll Service, and the timesheet function within Quickbooks, each person can access quickbooks, and you assign each employee an account and password that limits them to only inputting the time in teir timesheet. You can do this by having multiple quickbooks copies or one copy and load on each achine just one copy then is available to be in use at any time.

Time and Job info is input to the proper accounts and job codes by the employee each day, and review is quick at the end of the week or at the time of biling.

We use their payroll services as well and have not had any problems with it. You can have direct deposit into the employees accounts and have multiple direct deposit accounts per employee.

We

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We started using Billquick for bqe.com which integrates into Quickbooks pretty well but it's more of a full project Financial Management System vs, just time & payroll. If all you want it time and payroll, Quickbooks is meeting your needs for your project billing and management and don't want to worry about having to manage and keep running another system, I'd look at the Intuit Quickbook adds on as lvandevoorde suggests first, but take a look at Billquick. It may have something you didn't know you wanted.