Billzone Blog

3 Reasons to Switch to Online Timesheet Collection

Small business owners often wonder why they should be using an online hours collection system like the one we have here at www.billzone.com. In fact, most owners know they need a system like this but only some take the step.

Opportunity Cost
The biggest reason is simple. If you are spending valuable time collecting hours from contractors and/or employees for billing to your own clients, then you are not spending time either doing billable work for your clients, managing, or selling your product.

Usually the monthly cost of using BillZone to automate a 10 person team is less than a few hours of billing for one of the team's members, compared to one or two days worth of work for that member to do the task manually. For large enterprises, the benefits are even greater.

Accuracy
If you are consolidating a whole bunch of time entries from a variety of sources like paper timesheets or Excel workbooks, then your chances of creating an error during this double-entry process go up. When collection is centralized, data is only entered one time, thus reducing errors.

Timeliness
Speed up payment on your accounts receivable. Want your bills to go out on the first of the month instead of the 10th? Automate your process.

Six Pitfalls to Watch for When Starting that Excel Project

Spreadsheets are one of the most useful tools that businesses have today. Some people have become so proficient at using them that, as a result they use them all the time, for all kinds of things. This often leads into people using spreadsheets for purposes they weren't designed for. You would not use a spreadsheet when:

It needs to be shared concurrently.

When many others need to have access to view and update it, you need another tool. Excel allows one user at a time. This often leads to many people taking a copy of their own, which leads to a real mess when it all has to come back together.

You are continuously collecting data.

An engineer who has 50,000 rows and growing in an Excel sheet will soon hit the worksheet row limit of 65,536 rows. At that point she would have to figure out a way to continue.

The data needs to be secure.

Excel does not have data security in the same way an enterprise application does, and so can only protect data using some simple mechanisms.

The data needs to validated on entry.

Though it is possible to set up some data entry validation in excel, in practice, most people just pull up a sheet and start punching data into it. This can lead to errors in data-entry, making the data less accurate, and harder to run statistics on.

There is obviously another tool that would do it better.

There are examples of users creating letter templates, trying to maintain multi-user mission critical manufacturing schedules, trying to create graphics files with it, and more.

You're building a "database".

Many IT support staff find this to be one of the biggest misuses of Excel. Usually users spend a lot of time designing and entering data before they find their solution does not work. At this point the sheet is mission critical, so they ask their IT support staff to help them. It takes more time to analyze it, so time is wasted on both sides.

Ask for Help

If you find yourself in a position where you're considering using Excel for a project, consider some of the points above. If you fall into any of these categories, you may want to have a chat with your IT support staff or an IT specialist before continuing. You might find that a small amount of time invested with them up front will save you a large amount of grievance in the long run.

For example, they might be able to set up a simple SQL Server/MS Access database that everyone can use, has unlimited data entry, is more secure, and validates data on entry. As an added bonus, an MS Access front-end could spit out reports in Excel for analysis, a purpose Excel is more suited for.

Many thanks to people who contributed to a discussion on this topic at http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/information-technology/computers-software/TCH_ITS_CMP/625070-2600475

3 Reasons Why Continued Support for VBA in Microsoft Office is Good for SME Businesses

Microsoft discontinued support and enhancement of its Visual Basic 6 platform years ago, instead moving to its new .Net platform for enterprise applications. However, what many people don't know is that a flavour of VB called Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA as it is known, continued on in the Microsoft Office suite as the primary language for things like Excel and Word macros, and automation of Access database applications. It appears that, in spite of the relentless move toward .Net at Microsoft for many years, this technology will continue on and will be supported in Office 2010 (Office 14), and for SME business owners this is a very good thing.

1. Most businesses over 20 employees have invested in VBA-automated things for people "in the trenches", from simple mail merge applications in Word, to data extractions for analysis in Excel, to multi-user MS Access databases. Continuing support for these means that these companies will be able to extend the life of their investment.

2. Support for VBA also means that related technologies like the Jet database engine and Data Access Objects, or DAO can be supported by providers for years to come, on newer, more advanced platforms like Office 2010. For the large number of businesses who wrote entire systems around the MS Access/DAO/ODBC/SQL Server platform, this means they can stay current and be sure to be supported for years to come.

3. VBA with MS Access is regarded by many as the quickest way to prototype a working application for SME businesses due to a data access technology (DAO) tightly knit with the VBA language, a powerful design environment, and the best integration with other technologies in the office environment, like Word and Excel.

Ongoing VBA support means SME businesses can still get the best bang for their buck for years to come.

Why Basic Project Management Tools Are Good

Ok, you own a small business with several projects on the go at any one time. Why bother with keeping project records? I mean, you've got it all organized in your head, right? Besides, you looked at project management programs and found that they were overkill and wasted a huge amount of your time. Well, there are some very good reasons to use at least some basic project management tools in your business.

Try answering these questions:

- If your customer calls you and asks how much time you've burned to date on her project items, can you tell her right then and there? Or do you have to compile a bunch of information (and phone people) before you can tell her?

- Is your business relatively free from costly bookkeeping mistakes?

- Do all of your bills go out on time, all the time?

- Can you measure your success over the past few years? Can you see how often you've been on time for delivery of your projects?

If you answered no to any of these, you need some basic project management tools. Forget complex project plans, you just need to set up your project with a good list of deliverables on it. Make sure your people can access it and update it in real time, so that you or your bookkeeper don't have to spend as much time on it. You'll know how much you've burned and what the item completion status is at any one time, for all your projects, across your whole business.

Bookkeeping Success in Managing Resource Time-Entry

Say you're a bookkeeper; why would you want to change your small or medium sized business over to an automated time entry or time-tracking system? Well, you're going to get some of the biggest gains when it is switched over.

How many timesheets do you manage in a month? Do you use paper timesheets? An excel sheet; maybe one with a macro? How much time does it take to finish it each month?

The amount of time saved in automation grows as you handle more and more people. Say you have a company with 25 employees and contractors working for you. A short month might have 21 workdays in it, so if you are doing a manual sheet every day, you might have 525 sheets to process, plus comments and dozens of expense entries. Even if people only fill in a sheet one time per week, it is over 100 timesheets to process.

Feedback from our customers tells us that, even for a company with only 25 people, this manual process can take over a week when you include processing the invoices. Customers with the best success in converting time entry have seen their time committment go from 5 or more days to 1 day (80%+ reduction in effort and cost). Numerous other benefits, like the speeding up of receivables, have also followed successful implementations.

So, we ask you: Are you a bookkeeper in a small or medium size business? How many timesheets do you process? How long does it take you?