Accountants, lawyers, and consultants live and die by “billable hours.†They must keep accurate track of the time they spend on different tasks so that they can bill the client and get paid for their work.
I’m a consultant in the oil and gas industry and spend most of my time away from my home office, working at a client’s facility. I not only needed a comprehensive time-billing solution, I needed a mobile one. It seemed to me that the Pocket PC was the perfect platform for it, since mine is almost always with me wherever I go. I knew there were some time-billing programs for the Pocket PC and I decided to check them out.
Before looking at any software, I first determined what I needed to accomplish with it. I work with a variety of clients and I need a program that is flexible in the way it bills time. My specific needs were as follows:
Time entry
- Ability to enter time using a daily or an hourly rate
- Ability to use a timer to track time spent on a given task
- Ability to have different rates for the same client and be able to bill a client for different projects separately
- Ability to handle multiple clients, projects, and rates
- Ability to record travel time would be a plus, but not absolutely necessary
Viewing the data
- Flexible sorting, filtering, and manipulation of data for on-screen viewing
- Ability to filter the time entries by project, client, and task
- Ability to display activity summaries by day, week, and month
Exporting data
- Ability to export data to a desktop PC is critical
- Ability to export to QuickBooks or a spreadsheet (CSV files) would be a plus
Reporting
- Ability to generate reports in a common format (HTML, TXT, etc.) so they can be printed from desktop PC
- Ability to configure the format of the report
- Ability to preview reports on the Pocket PC
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