Personal Articles Collection

By: Simon Durant

Time tracking and billing software solutions are cost-effective and time-saving tools which provide an invaluable assistance in billing and managing time-sheets. Advertising, Accounting, IT and Project Management companies can benefit tremendously by deploying a proven solution. The avant-garde of these applications have both web-based and desktop-based interfaces for superior performance. The web-based interface is used to provide the staff, clients and management access to time-sheets, management reports and client information. On the other hand, the desktop interface gives the administration staff an efficient tool to manage processes such as client and job management, invoicing and the many other components.

These applications offer a wide array of business processes, the following are a few of their key features which make them, a must.

• These solutions can efficiently bill the resources at varied rates for different portions of a project or they can also bill the whole project at a single rate. They also help in the flexible management of resource allocation.
• With user modifiable reporting system, the reporting, budgeting and ongoing management of projects become simple and easier. The reporting system is accessible by the web and the desktop as well.
• The applications also simplify the billing, debt collection and cash flow management of a company with the wizards, reports and simple management screens.
• An easy solution to resource management commission models and performance targets is achieved through the wizards, reports and easy to use screens.
• On a web interface the clients can easily review bills and work performed against selected projects.
• Security: Most applications feature different login permission levels, so as to give a limited and secure access based on user discretion.
• User management: With these applications the user accounts can also be linked to the Operating System user accounts and thus he/she can login with the OS username and password.
• With the smart billing rate structure, one can create different billing rates per client or per staff member or even per project.
• They provide an effective expense tracking solution, pre-set cost and billing rates for expenses such as photocopying, stationery, travel can be easily set.
• The best of these software come with timer function, which very efficiently tracks the time spent on a project or component of a project such as a task.
• The applications with a web based time sheet approval, can be employed in organizations where line mangers or workflow style requirements exist. Time sheets can be submitted by any staff member for approval by their managers.
• These applications provide a transparent billing solution, as with an efficient management tool one can easily provide the client with all bills and invoices via a secure web access. Thus, a lot of unnecessary wastage of time is avoided.

These solutions are built on innovative and high performance oriented technologies such as AJAX, SQL Server, Web Services and ASP.NET. Also, what gives these applications an edge, is the number of users it can support, which is infinite. As the number of people it can support is only limited by the hardware’s capacity. Moreover these applications, if they are based on SQL Server and Web services make the integration with a third party application a very easy task especially if they employ interfaces based on standards such as XML and XSLT.

Now with this tool, sky is the limit for a company which aims for a high standard of efficient service and success. This high-end application will certainly remove a significant amount of manual work which affect your business growth, your billing and internal efficiencies. Thus enabling you to give only the best to your clients. After all, working smart and efficiently is crucial for one’s success.