Are you PTBB?

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You see them all the time, quickly walking here, checking email there, texting between calls.  Colleagues like this look busy as heck, right? And it’s expected nowadays, that you’ll always be reachable, by email, text, chat and so on. But is it the way to achieve results, or is it just a syndrome I call PTBB (Pretending To Be Busy)?

How PTBB differs from just getting it done (GID).

PTBB: Sits down at desk and opens email
GID: Sits down at desk and opens Quicktimesheets.com
–
PTBB: Checking and responding to email all day.
GID: Allocates time to email-responding by treating it as a task

Are you PTBB?

–

PTBB: Crowds mind with 25 browser tabs open:

crowded mind tabs

GID: Clears mind by making quicktimesheet.com the browser home page and closing tabs after use:

ptbb2

–

PDBB: Says yes to everything.
GID: Checks Quicktimesheets to see if time is available for the meeting or task:

Can do it friday

PTBB: Tries to remember all the things needed to do, forgets some, then panics as deadline approaches.
GID: Arranges tasks by using Entry Types to set/edit priority:

   entry types for priority

 

PTBB: Allows tasks and projects to drag on by getting bogged down in the details.
GID: Actively sets an end date for the project and pushes to deliver by that date.

Nothing assists creativity and pressure produces diamonds. It’s best if the pressure is internal (ie coming from you…rather than external ie coming from an angry client!)

diamonds

 

The time constraint will push you to focus and be more efficient, even if you end up having to go back and add a bit more later.

 –

PTBB: Rushes from one task to the next

 GID: Leave a buffer between tasks.  When we rush between tasks, it’s more difficult to stay focused. Take a moment to refresh and de-stress:

 ptbb5

 –

 The final tip to avoid PTBB:
Use your timesheet every day. Make it a habit.

Have a friend/colleague/spouse who could benefit from www.quicktimesheets.com?
Send them the link, they’ll thank you for it!

 kate support minion

Kate Bradshaw
Quicktimesheets
Mobile: +61 411 811 417
Skype: Quicktimesheets

We’ve been acquired

News

We’re very excited to announce that Quick Timesheets has been acquired by the team behind SoftGen Australia who are based in Sydney.

Since launching our new time sheets platform 12 months ago, Quick Timesheets has grown it’s customer base both within Australia and internationally. In fact, we now serve customers in more than 11 countries world-wide. We are now a trusted timesheeting partner for local and Australian Federal Government departments, Universities and international firms, as well as local consulting businesses and accounting practices.

So with our growth comes a new set of challenges and it’s for these reasons that we’ve decided to add new capacity to our management team.

We’d like to welcome Leon Manson as our new Managing Director who will be overseeing Quick Timesheets’ growth and assisting our customers. You can contact Leon at leon@quicktimesheets.com.

We’re also looking at increasing our feature-set to include new plugins for cloud accounting systems such as MYOB, Xero, and Quick Books. Also planned is greater support for timesheet approvals. We’d also like to hear what you think, so please let us know and share your ideas with our team on our contact page.

Thanks to all our customers for their support and we’re very excited about the next year ahead!

- The Quick Timesheets team

A Timesheet Milestone.

News, , ,

We recently reached a major milestone for our small but efficient cloud-based company  in Australia and we’d like to thank you!

One Millions Hours Logged

Our customers have logged more than 1 Million hours of time in Quick Timesheets. That’s over 41,000 days of time, or 114 years of non-stop time entry. It’s mind boggling to think that we originally built the product for our small software consultancy, and now it’s used by hundreds of customers around the world, including large businesses, Government agencies, consulting companies, as well as many freelancers.

So thanks again to all our customers who’ve contributed to this amazing milestone. We rely on your business, and as always we’re here to help!

- Ian & The Quick Timesheets Team

 

August Release: New Reports and Features

New Feature, , , ,

This week we’re releasing some new reporting features to Quick Timesheets, so we thought we’d share some of these new improvements on our blog. As always, we’d love to hear from you if you have any feature requests.

Budgeted Hours Report

You can now allocated an “Estimate Hours” to a task, and bring up a report to see the completion of hours logged vs the projects or tasks budget.

Budgeted Hours Report
Example: You might allocate 100 hours to a particular project, and the report will highlight the number of hours completed against the budget. If a project is running over budget, the chart will display the task in Red ( > 100%).

How can I set up a Budgeted Hours Report?
To set up a budget of hours against a project or task, just edit a Task (Settings -> Client/Tasks) and enter the budgeted hours in the “Estimated Hours” field. You can edit this field at any time in case you want to allocate more hours to a task.

Download to Excel / CSV

This has been a frequently asked for feature so we’re very pleased to announce this! You can now download the tabular data for most reports into Excel or any software that accepts CSV (comma separated values) .

Download to ExcelTo download to Excel, download your report data using the “Download to Excel/CSV” link at the bottom of the chart. You can then load this into Excel or your favorite spreadsheet application.

Report Hours By Category

You can now chart the number of hours logged by Category of time. You can set up your own Categories from the Settings page, and the report also breaks down the Rate Type for each Category.

Report Hours By Category

As an example you can chart the breakdown of Billable and Unbillable time for Meetings, Research and Design.

Thanks again to all our customers and for suggesting new features for Quick Timesheets. We build our software for our customers, so please ask us if you have a feature request. If you’re new to Quick Timesheets, why don’t you sign up to a free trial or have a look at more of our features?

- The Quick Timesheets team

 

 

Featured Customer: Victorian Electoral Commission

Featured Customer, , ,

In this month’s edition of our Featured Customer Series, we caught up with Quick Timesheets’ customer Simon Hancock from the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC). Simon is the IT Manager and we asked him about how they use Quick Timesheets to support technology operations at the Victorian Electoral Commission.

Tell us about the Victorian Electoral Commission. What is the organization and what is your team responsible for?

The VEC is a state authority, reporting to the Victorian parliament and tasked with the conduct of elections for the State of Victoria. We also conduct the elections for the 79 Victorian local governments & the City of Melbourne. We are currently in the lead up to the next Victorian state election to be held in November this year.

Victorian Electoral Commission

Victorian Electoral Commission, Melbourne, Australia

The VEC uses technology across all of its operations. We develop our own software that is used to manage & administer all our elections and the maintenance of the State roll as well as the provision of online services through our website. We also roll-out an extensive network and will be deploying over 5,000 separate pieces of technology for the November election.

How do you use Quick Timesheets in your business?

We undertake our own software development and this requires us to bring in additional resources to work on our projects. We are running multiple projects simultaneously and a resource may work on a number of different projects in a billing period. All project resources are required to enter their times against a project and when their company submits an invoice I can run a Quick Timesheets report to apportion costs correctly into our GL system. I also require resources to differentiate between “work” & “meetings” to try and quantify how much time is spent in meetings !!

Why did you choose Quick Timesheets?

We are not a large development team so I didn’t want a complex project tracking system, but I did want a product that was web based, not housed at the VEC, and allowed me a way to get project staff to book their time against a project. I had tried a number of “free” products as well as a “punch in\out” application for SharePoint but they didn’t offer me the features I wanted plus it was difficult to extract the data and they weren’t particularly easy to use. I did the usual research using my tool of choice – Google – and came across Quick Timesheets.

It gives me everything I am looking for, reasonably priced and Australian based so the purchasing decision was easy. It has been working really well – I get the data I want and my project staff get an easy to use time sheeting product

How does your team unwind on a Friday afternoon? (after work finishes of course!)

We have a lunchtime foosball table (not booked in Quick Timesheets) and occasionally have a Friday run to the Thunder Road brewery in Brunswick.

Thanks for answering our questions Simon! Are you interested in our easy-to-use online timesheets? Visit our website at www.quicktimesheets.com, check out our comprehensive Feature Tour and get started for free.

From Thailand with love: Building Russia’s largest travel website

Featured Customer,

We love hearing from our customers, and this month we got in touch with JetRadar, one of Russia’s largest and fastest growing online travel companies. JetRadar’s mostly Russian marketing and development team are based on the island resort of Phuket in Thailand, with offices also in Hong Kong and Australia.

We caught up with Max Kraynov, JetRadar’s CEO who resides in Sydney, Australia and asked a few questions to learn more about how one of Russia’s largest travel website uses Quick Timesheets to help track time spent in their business.

What is JetRadar and how did you start out?

JetRadar (also known as AviaSales.ru in Russia) is a flights meta-search company, querying airlines and online travel agencies to find affordable airfares and cheap flights. We started the company in 2007; back in the day it was a blog listing airfare sales – surprisingly, it got a huge following among readers, and we implemented a simple search engine allowing people to find suitable offers. Then we started connecting travel agencies, then airlines via API – and now you can find tickets from most airlines from all around the world.

aviasales-office

JetRadar’s Offices on the island resort of Phuket, Thailand


What do you use Quick Timesheets for?

QuickTimesheets helps us to keep track of tasks and instantly see how the effort is spread between the cool stuff (new development) and the necessary stuff (maintenance). It’s incredibly important to be able to find that moment in the life of a product when maintenance becomes too expensive, and a major rehaul is needed. Also, we capitalize certain bits of our software for accounting purposes, hence it’s important to capitalize just the right stuff, not everything.

What insights have you gained?

Using QuickTimesheets creates transparency around who accomplishes what; the team can make major decisions around who’s better suited to do certain bits of work. It doesn’t replace good project management, but greatly supplements it.

 What other cloud software do you use?

We use BambooHR for HR, Saasu for accounting, Highrise for CRM, Google Drive for backups and numerous monitoring systems for making sure all ducks are in a row all the time.

What do your staff do on a Friday afternoon?

Other than beers, we have mini-lectures for everyone who would listen about a variety of topics – ranging from sales to creative design. The usual attendance is 8-12 people (out of 80), which is just enough to have meaningful conversations. And then the enlightened team goes out to a nightclub.
jetradar index page 2

jetradar offices

Best office view ever? The view from JetRadar’s office in Thailand.

What’s the weirdest thing in your office?

The weirdest thing in our office is the telescope, which we use to spy on private parties on nearby boats (our office is on a shore of the Andaman Sea). Just kidding, we use it to gaze at the stars, of course. Actually, some outsiders fail to understand why our work days starts at 12pm; it’s simple: we encourage surfing and lots of our colleagues catch a wave or two in the morning.

Sign up for a Free 30 Day Trial of Quick Timesheets, and start tracking time in your business.

Saasu Invoicing Step by Step Video Tutorial

Guides, , ,

Our Saasu connector is a popular feature (available in our Starter plan) and allows our customers to export their timesheets as invoices in Saasu Accounting.

We’ve put together a quick (12 minutes) video to demonstrate how to get set up with invoicing your timesheets into Saasu from your Quick Timesheets account.

This step by step guide will show you how to set up Quick Timesheets to Invoice to Saasu. We’ll show you how to set up the connector, and give you an example of three types of Invoices you can create: Time & Materials, Service Item, and Lump Sum.

A Customer Case Study: GetBusi and R&D Tax Reporting

Featured Customer, , , , , ,

The team here at Quick Timesheets love knowing that we’re helping people track their times more efficiently and more conveniently  wherever they may be.

We recently asked one of our customers, GetBusi, about how they came to use Quick Timesheets and their rationale behind tracking time in their business for R&D reporting.

GetBusi

What is GetBusi all about?

Getbusi is a software development company that provides a range of highly scalable and flexible internet management appliances and software solutions to deliver internet security, filtering, monitoring and reporting.

The Business Imperative

Getbusi’s IT department effort is split between new development and maintaining the existing products.

A key issue for Getbusi has been to implement a management tool that better utilises resources and provides a financial reporting solution that can meet the rigorous reporting requirements for the company to claim the Australian Government’s R&D tax rebate.

Why did you choose Quick Timesheets?

To identify an appropriate solution we trialled a number of time recording packages. Key requirements were for a system that was easy to use, did not require additional system implementation and management resources, was cost effective and provided sufficient reporting and tracking capability to manage numerous projects independently.

As a result of our research and market testing, Getbusi implemented Quick Timesheets as its time recording and reporting system.

How GetBusi uses Quick Timesheets

We initially deployed Quick Timesheets to just record the new development activities for the R&D tax rebate but found it to be an invaluable tool to better utilise resources and subsequently rolled it out to the entire development team.

Quick Timesheets has allowed us to efficiently and effectively log hours spent on projects, enabling us to produce reports, summaries, invoices and critically for us track time to claim the R&D tax rebate.

Quick Timesheets also has the capability to export data to other software packages for further analysis and reporting. This includes exporting to Excel as part of our financial budgeting process as well as allowing us to graph and report on the information using other visual reporting packages.

Passing the “Audit Test”

A key test for QuickTimesheets was when we were selected for an Australian Taxation Office R&D audit. The audit process was made very simple as we had recorded and managed the required information in an accurate and an easily reported format through Quick Timesheets. The information passed all the Taxation Office’s rigorous reporting requirements and we were given a clean bill of health with no adjustments or changes required to our R&D rebate claim.

Ease of Use and Timely Support

Overall, Getbusi has found QuickTimesheets to be a very user-friendly application, where we can simply use a single sign-on (SSO) through our Google Apps account. The system is very easy to learn and very easy to customise.

As the solution is delivered as a Software as a Service  (SaaS) application from the cloud we have instant access to it anywhere. It has also meant that it is fully maintained without any additional hardware overhead or resource requirements from our own internal IT department.

Finding out more

You can learn more about GetBusi at www.getbusi.com.

Are you interested in our easy-to-use online timesheets? Visit our website at www.quicktimesheets.com, check out our comprehensive Feature Tour and get started for free.

biarri-moments-023

Featured Customer: Biarri

Featured Customer, , , , ,

At Quick Timesheets, we love hearing from customers. It’s always interesting to discover what they get up to and how our software integrates with their business.

Ian approached one of our very innovative customers, Biarri, and they agreed to answer a few questions for us about their company culture, what they do and how they integrate Quick Timesheets and other cloud software solutions into their business.

biarri-moments-022

What is Biarri and how did you start the company?

Biarri is a commercial mathematics business which Ash Nelson and Joe Forbes started to bring the power of mathematical optimisation and simulation to business in an accessible and simple way. We deliver smart planning and scheduling solutions in web based applications which are quick to deploy and easy to use.

What do you use Quick Timesheets for in your business?

We have a team of really great mathematics and computer science graduates and we use Quick Timesheets to track the time we spend on client projects and internal development tasks.  It allows us to accurately bill customers, track profitability and utilisation.
 
We chose Quick Timesheets because it is also an Australian SaaS application which was really easy to use.
 
biarri-moments-016

What insights have you gained or benefits from using Quick Timesheets?

Quick Timesheets gives us a much better understanding of project profitability and team utilisation. It also means we can track annual leave and record hours worked for paying our casuals and students.

We also use it to support our R&D tax concession calculations.
 
biarri-moments-015

What other cloud software solutions do you use in your business?

Biarri consciously chooses to use cloud based software tools as we deliver our maths based apps by the cloud – we thought it was important to walk the walk.

We also use SAASU as our accounting software (it is also great), Expensify for travel expenses,  Confluence and Jira from Atlassian and a number of cloud storage options including DropBox and Google Drive.

What does your business do on a Friday afternoon to unwind?

On Friday afternoon we enjoy having a few drinks while we catch up on the week. Lots of the team travel to customers out of town, so it is great chance to find out what everyone has been up to and cover weekend plans. We have a few craft and dark beer experts in the office and the music can range from Jay-Z to some cool bagpipes.

What’s the weirdest thing in your office?

We have a pretty low key office with trestle tables and bean bags.  The weirdest thing might be the floor to ceiling smiley face sticker, to remind us of one of our core values – honour.
 

biarri-moments-023

You can learn more about Biarri at www.biarri.com.

Are you interested in our easy-to-use online timesheets? Visit our website at www.quicktimesheets.com, check out our comprehensive Feature Tour and get started for free.