Posted by Sean MacKenzie on Thu, Jul 22, 2010
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.
Posted by Sean MacKenzie on Tue, Mar 30, 2010
In a world of increasing connectivity it makes no sense for any entity to use or enforce a date display that could be misinterpreted by others.
Ambiguous Dates
An ambiguous date format is one which requires a reader to reference some external source, such as a policy or standard in order to understand what real date the display is actually referring to. For example, if you looked at a report with the date
2/3/08 on it, you would need to find out which country it was written in, which standard was used for dates in the report, or even worse, guess what the author meant when using this format.
Examples
Food and drink producers in many countries are guilty of this practice. Consumers are often confounded by dates on products in formats they cannot decipher. For example, depending on what country you're in or which product you're about to eat, a date of
11 MA 10 on a canned good could mean
March 11th, 2010,
March 10th, 2011,
May 11th, 2010, or
May 10th, 2011! Make the wrong choice and you could be in trouble.
Businesses run into problems when dates are ambiguous, as they create scheduling mixups, customer order mixups, and more. The inefficiency caused by this issue can be significant.
Many governments and international bodies enforce their own versions of ambiguous date formats, which causes confusion. Even some international standards promote ambiguous dates such as the ISO 8601 dotted standard that would show February 3rd, 2008 as
03.02.2008 (this could be interpreted as March 2nd, 2008 in areas of North America using m/d/yy). ISO 8601 also uses a more logical format that shows the same date as
2008-02-03, which has less of a chance of misinterpretation since it appears to be in descending orders of magnitude (yyyy-mm-dd).
Use Unambiguous Dates!
What can you do? Well, you can help by changing peoples' attitudes in the workplace by discouraging the use of ambiguous date formats, and by challenging any standards or policies that enforce the use of ambiguous formats, since they are obsolete in a connected world and create organizational inefficiency.
It doesn't mean that everyone has to always use a long format (ex. February 9th, 2011), as there are popular short date formats like
dd-mmm-yyyy. This would be my first choice and would show the date as
09-Feb-2011. The day and month elements are known on first glance, and cannot be misinterpreted. My second choice would be for people to use the ISO 8601 standard
2011-02-09, which is logical and has month and day elements that would be guessed correctly by most people.
Posted by Sean MacKenzie on Thu, Sep 17, 2009
Making a Good Set of Categories
One of the most important things you can do when setting up your business on any kind of project management, expensing, or time-tracking software is to make sure you categorize your billing and expenses.
If you create a good set of categories in the beginning, your small business will really benefit down the road. You will be able to see important trends on how you ran your business in the past, and these will help you plan for the future. They will also help to simplify management of your general ledger (GL) and accounts receivable (AR).
Business Items
The first set of categories you create should include a set of items for the overall operation of your small business. These will not be related to projects you are working on, but generally account for "everything that is not a project". Usually, these will include some major categories such as Marketing, Finance, or Accounting. Within these areas, you might split the category into a few more, but generally that is where you would stop.
For example, you might add a few sub-categories like Market Research or Ad Design to the Marketing category.
Project Items
The second set of billing areas you can create will include your projects that you are working on for customers over time. Each project should have its own set of items and sub-items or categories. Your billing system should allow for projects to have multiple versions over time.
For example, you might write a small piece of software one year and then two years later do development to enhance the same software. If you do many versions over time, it is much easier to see statistics over the long run.
You should determine the kind of billing your project will need before you set it up. While some projects may have a standard set of items, others may need to have specific defined items created before you put your time and expenses against them. Make sure your system can do both.
A general contractor might simply put all his time against general items like Carpentry and Electrical, and this may be enough for his reporting purposes. Another contractor might need to specify exact items to bill against, like Breaker Box F, Switch Setup. A lawyer might set up project items for each contract or set of meetings they have been asked to do.
Get Advice
It may seem overly cautious to ask advice about which categories to set up, but it is also a good idea to talk with your accountant when setting up categories the first time. They will have good advice on how to set things up the first time, for both Business Items and Project Items.