ÿ\XY\TSLIPS.ASC 1826 words AS TIME GOES BY: Timeslips III and the Fine Art of Time-Billing By MICHAEL FINLEY Not everyone gets paid by the week or by the month. A whole class of professionals and skilled technicians -- attorneys, public relations people, electricians, CPAs, graphic designers, plumbers; anyone who consults, really -- get paid for the hours they bill. And how they bill those hours is a matter of some controversy. Often, individuals at the account executive level are told by their employees that they must bill a certain percentage of hours every month -- 65-75% are common figures. There is a strong temptation on account reps to pad the hour-count to meet that difficult quota, to turn ten hours of work into 15 or 20 on the invoice. Sometimes, hours are added at the boss' whim. Three extra hours billed per month per 20 clients at $75/hour may not bother clients, but it buys a nice boat. On the down side, hours are hard to keep track of -- attorneys are hard put to mark down every incoming phone call, particularly with call waiting. Panicky account execs lay awake nights wondering whether every 6- or 15-minute increment that day was tallied. Sometimes the very work of tallying is included in the tallying -- half an hour every day, just to enter the other hours, and it's all billable, if you're clever. There are other factors that I have never been able to bill for. Let's say you are a public relations account exec, doing a lot of government relations work. A client calls, and he is distraught that a vote is coming up on Monday morning in the Senate, and needs desperately to call Sen. Boschwitz and make a plea that he vote a certain way. But Sen. Boschwitz is incommunicado -- off at his private resort fishing. What to do? Now let's say you are privy to the sort of precious information your client needs -- it's nobody's business how. The phone number may mean the life or death of your client's business, yet it takes only eleven seconds to flip through your rolodex for it. What do you charge your client? Seventy-five cents? Are you really selling time to clients? Or are you selling value? Answer that question "time" and you are henceforward a prisoner of the clock; answer it "value" and you open the door to chicanery and flimflam, along with the worthwhile stuff. You can see why time-billing has professionals more than a little confused. As a consequence, time-billing is the single most "creative" accounting feature in business today. Clients have no way to dispute the number of hours a contractor claims to have put in, especially those performed off-site. Mistrust over time-billing might just be the number one cause of agency/firm firings -- it is a fact that more accounts collapse within 72 hours of billing than at any other time. The result of slipshod time-billing too often is suspicion, overcharging, declining business ethics, shallow business relationships, and market instability. But hey, here comes Timeslips III, the latest update of a memory-resident time-billing software product that has many, many professionals singing its praises. Timeslips is essentially an accounting database -- it keeps track of hourly charges, plus expenses, plus interest on aging accounts, plus payments. In that sense it is not unlike accounts receivable segments in many an accounting software package. What makes Timeslips unique is the fact that it is a TSR program -- when you turn TSTIMER.COM off, it keeps running in background -- and while it does, it invisibly times the number of seconds, minutes, and hours you are working on a job -- or on a dozen jobs. And it compiles and organizes all this information using a unit called a "timeslip" -- the rough equivalent of the envelope flap, timecard line, or Post-It note you may currently be using to keep track of your hours. Example: You're a graphic designer, and you have four clients, 3M, Pillsbury, Honeywell and Control Data, and each has you working on an assignment this week. For every individual task you or out-of-pocket expense you must pay for a given client -- meeting with them, planning, mileage, typesetting costs, parking -- you fill out a timeslip. At the end of the month you may have a "stack" of 30 or 50 timeslips. Each is organized by three factors -- who did the work or incurred the expense in question, what client each is for, and what activity/expense it is. At billing time (or upon concluding a given job), you simply load the reporting program (TSREPORT.COM), and have it tally up the costs for each of the four clients, and bill them. A sample timeslip would say: __________________________________________________________________________ User [1 ] Michael Finley $40 = Account [12 ] Computer User = Activity [ ] Article = $250.00 Article_on_time_billing_software_______ Reference [ ] Time estimated [ 7:00:00] Date [04/28/88] thru [05/18/88] Time spent [10:15:00] Flat rate: $250 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- A timeslip is not a bill, and clients never see them -- they are the units that bills and other reports are later compiled from. Timeslips III has an elaborate reporting program which can kick out bills upon completing a project, at month's end, or over any specified period. And it incorporates a powerful macro utility which keeps keying to a minimum. All I had to do to get my name on the slip above was type M; all I typed to get "Computer User" was CO. The entire slip took perhaps 30 seconds to flesh out. The entire bill might also include a slip for postage and mileage expenses incurred in preparing this column. Timeslips doesn't stop there, however. It offers you the option of timing the work for you, or having you fill in the blanks yourself. If you forgot to toggle the timer on for a given job, no problem -- you just fill in the time to the best of your recollection. Timeslips' great virtue is that it doesn't tie you down. It lets you charge different hourly rates for different services -- $15 for typing, $50 for drafting, $120 for conceptualizing, for instance. It lets you charge different hourly rates for junior associates ($40) and senior associates ($80), different rates for different clients ($50 for commercial clients, $35 for nonprofits) -- it even lets you vary from hourly rates entirely, charging clients with lump sum amounts (e.g., $1,500 for designing a brochure), regardless of the amount of time it takes). Flexibility is the very spine of Timeslips III. Once you remove the shrinkwrap, Timeslips is comprised of two diskettes and a manual. Once installed, and once you have added a few timeslips of your own, the \TIMESLIP subdirectory exceeds 1000K, so a hard disk is absolutely mandatory. The pop-up part of Timeslips III requires 60K to run; combine that with the reporting feature, and you've gobbled up almost 400K -- don't imagine you can run the whole program as a pop-up alongside your word processing program or spreadsheet, unless you've long since broken the 640K barrier. Also, the program is a bit uncomfortable sharing your RAM with other programs -- I have gotten INSUFFICIENT MEMORY messages from Timeslips while using TSR programs as innocuous as Sidekick. Timeslips can handle 30,000 individual timeslips, 250 users (your employees or colleagues, working off an LAN), 3400 accounts and 250 separate activities. For those interested in even greater integration, North Edge Software also offers a program to incorporate Timeslips billing information into the popular ledger program, One-Write Plus. The bridging program, called Time-Link:plus, costs $49.95. North Edge really thinks the three programs together is something terrific, so they're dealing discount versions of One-Write Plus for only $295, when bought with Time-Link:plus. One-Write Plus, a product of Great American Software, Amherst, NH, lists for $295 by itself. You can better that discount by buying them in a store, or from a mail merchandiser. Timeslips is also compatible, using TAL -- Timeslips Accounting Link -- with numerous other accounting programs. These include ACT-1 (cougar mountain Software), Accounting for Micros (James River Group), DAC Easy (DAC Software), Peachtree Accounting II (Peachtree Software), Great Plains General Ledger (Great Plains Software) and Ready-to-Run Accounting (Manusoft). And there are still others, according to North Edge. Or you can limp along, as millions of us do, using Lotus or some such spreadsheet to tally your accounts. If you're into accounting software, you may be aware that Timeslips III (and One-Write Plus, too, for that matter) is a darling of the reviewing press, praised for its elegance and learnability. I will vouch for its elegance, but I would also issue a slight note of caution as for its learnability. There is such a thing as documentation having too much respect for the reader's intelligence. I had trouble reading between the lines in the Timeslips manual. The part of me that appreciates succinct and human writing warmed to it; the dumber part of me, that was panting to keep pace with Timeslips' demands, wanted more hand-holding. But a week later, by dint of trial and error, you will have up and running one smooth time-billing program. Timeslips is a great example of how a bright, small company, can spot a need in the marketplace, provide a solution that is intuitive and simple, and sell it for less ($199.95 for the big-database version, $129.95 for the small-business version) than multiple limb amputation. One reservation here is that North Edge warns against installing a single copy of Timeslips III for use on more than one computers. With the capacity for 250 users, does North edge expect the larger user to buy 250 copies? Or does one hire a full-time bookkeeper to run a program sold for its simplicity? Something there has got to give. One final note of caution is in order. Timeslips will simplify your billing routines and your life, and, if you let it boss you around, timing your every phone call and hiccup, it will guarantee honesty in your billings. But the truth is, you probably won't wind up using it that way. You'd have to remember to toggle on, toggle off, on, off, on-and-off, all through your day -- without fail -- every time you switched tasks or were interrupted in the middle of one. I don't know about you, but that's not my idea of a fun way to run a business. No, I suspect that instead of reforming the business of billing time, Timeslips will wind up in most offices being an exquisite, transparent mechanism for keeping hours the shrouded mystery they have always been. Same scruffy business, but oh, the shine on those shoes! # # # TIMESLIPS III, North Edge Software Corp., 239 Western Avenue, Essex, MA 01929, ph. 617/768-6100; a time-billing program for IBM compatibles; 384K required.