Discovering the advantages of web based time tracking – how we’ve become ‘Tiwixers’

I guess you had some difficulties to track your time in a hectic working-week, when you had to manage twenty clients and twenty projects at the same time. Your boss might be keen on to follow precisely how many hours you spend on to complete tasks and follow up projects running parallel. It is not because he/she wants to check you in every minute of your day, rather because of clients. For instance, one of my best friends is working in an architecture studio and at the end of a project they have not only to deliver the keys of the building but also to report to their clients how many hours they spent on project realization and management. Thus having the right data about hours and tasks is essential for them.

Things become more interesting when you have to invoice clients based on hours and you are lack of reliable documentation of time tracking. You certainly will make it difficult to prove how many hours to which tasks of the project were allocated.

The possibility of encounter similar scenarios in your business without having the right tool in your hand is quite high. Consequently if you are an employee may find hard to provide your boss with a trustworthy report on project time. And if you are the boss you may not be able to bill properly the hours your employees have spent working on the client’s account. And if you are not able to be accurate on these aspects, reliability and professionalism of your company is at stake.

If this is for you not a scenario but your reality, it’s probably time to consider using a time tracking application to help you improve your business processes.

For us these situations were so real, that we lived some dramatic moments in our office. Hence one day we sat down and discussed how to improve the efficiency of our little company. We decided to invest in time tracking applications.

The first thing we had to face was a relatively wide choice of time tracking applications available in the market. We created an account where it was possible to do it without being charged and tried out how those applications are designed and what they offer in terms of recording and monitoring timesheets. We looked also for more advanced features such as compliance with other systems and flexibility to create personalized tasks and projects. Another important “must” was for us that the application had fit into our “paperless office” philosophy. Last but not least, given that we are located in Europe we had to quit all those applications made only for US clients and not offering time clock with European time zones and currencies we use here.

After a while comparing a couple of products, we have arrived to Tiwix. Tiwix is an amazingly smart and simple product of a little and dynamic Swiss startup. On the top of the features we needed and mentioned above, we find it a very useful tool and brought it into play for different reasons:

·         We can track not only time linked to one project, but also expenses (costs of journey, material, lunch with client etc.)

·         We use it as organizer entering list of tasks to everybody in our team. It is possible to assign task to other users. Furthermore we can link deadlines to tasks and see which of our works are in progress and how far we are from the completion of it.

·         We can analyse how much time and resources hang together and you can produce different reports by selecting the criteria you want to compare.

·         We have no problems to bill the exact time spent for a particular project. We can differentiate among billable and non billable activities. We can track the volume of our businesses. Tiwix is like our business mirror, we look at ourselves into it and see whether we are working efficient enough or there are some loose ends.

·         We have personalised invoice template that we print directly from Tiwix.

·         We adopted it as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This means that Tiwix offers us a web-based solution, so we didn’t have to neither buy the software nor to worry about technology and maintenance of it. We can use it on demand. Overall, we save a lot of time using this time tracking software. If you consider important to provide with a smart and high quality solution your business and employees, I advise to choose Tiwix. Moreover it is available in Italian, English, and German.  Next time I help you to find out how does Tiwix.

Till that check out their site: www.tiwix.com.