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Timesheet/Time Tracking and Invoice Software 2

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Geotech_Pavement

Geotechnical
Sep 21, 2020
12
We are a geotechnical/civil/construction inspections company . We have about 20 employees. It is 8 engineers and 12 field lab and field personnel. The one's in the lab/field do not do project management and only need simple time sheet entry and expense sheet entry.

We have about 6 project managers that need to track the budget of the project by task and create invoices. Right now we use excel to fill out time sheets, track time, and create invoices. Because we use excel, the engineers/project managers many times forget to track hours of the field personnel and sometimes forget to invoice the clients.

The main things we would need are

1.) time tracking (timesheets)
2.) budgeting for the project
3.) Invoicing capabilities using data from timesheets directly
4.) Software notifications to remind us to send invoices.
5.) Reminders of how many hours been invoiced and how many hours are unbilled/not invoiced for projects

From the this forum I have seen the following software recommended: FactorApp, BQE and Harvest. We want something simple. Let me know what you think.
 
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For the size of your firm, no software solution that does what you want will be simple to set up. You're going to have to dedicate at least one employee to learning it inside and out for a few weeks and get everything set up. Then you'll have to dedicate some training time to get all the project managers and employees up to speed on their respective roles within the system. Then you can roll it out, with hiccups, and get it smoothed out.

I like BQE. It does everything you want it to do (I think - not sure about invoice reminders...it has auto invoicing so there's probably a setting to do it have it remind you, but I haven't dealt with that) and then some, but you don't have to do the stuff you don't want to do. And they have great customer service and support staff.
 
All three options could work but won't do everything you have listed. I would recommend talking to Factor's and BQE's sales reps to talk specifics and pricing. Harvest is pretty simplistic. You could just run through their free trial without talking to anyone. I also heard Deltek just revamped their system, but I haven't heard if it's any good.

We use Factor and are generally pretty happy with it. They are still relatively new but are constantly working on improvements. The biggest thing for me is they don't have a good interface for mobile. Their support has been great, and easy to work with.
 
Have to looked at Xero?


I remember from one of my friends who set up a company with a few others that the transition from 10 to 15 employees to more than that was the hardest as simple systems like excel didn't work anymore, but it was difficult to justify a dedicated person to run a new system.

But that's what it takes.

All the things you mention really need a dedicated person to track them with the help of some software.

I always think s lot of systems are built as though all businesses work the same as software engineers!


Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.
 
We use BQE for project management, budgeting, invoicing - works well. We use Wrike for time management. I wish the two worked together. If BQE did time management, as in scheduling hours etc. we would probably just use it. We looked at Ajera as that is what we used at a previous firm, it is probably the one that has everything you are asking for, but it comes at a steep premium, if I recall correctly when we were just 3 engineers, they quoted 10 to 15k just for setup and I forget the monthly rate, at the time it just didn't make sense for us, however at your size, it may make sense for you. A lot of the guys I know at larger firms, think 100+ use one of Deltek's products.
 
Aesur - have you tried BQE's forecasting? It's not quite as good as direct scheduling, but still useful. Float is another good time/scheduling program, but pretty limited in scope.
 
phamENG - I'll check it out, Wrike is good, but still lacking a bit.
 
Hmmmm. Looking at the OP, you have 20 employees, 8 engineers and 12 field or lab people.

So no admin, finance or management???

Really? No wonder you forget to bill clients.
How on earth do you get clients?
This doesn't sound right.

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.
 
I think QuickBooks online would provide you with everything you are looking for. You can create estimates with anticipated hours, create timesheets, invoice off of estimates (and it will show you how much is left from the estimate), and setup notifications. I think the timesheet function is a add-on.
 
Our firm switched to Paycom (mainly for the HR stuff, but it also does timesheets). I don't recommend the time aspect of it at all. In our work we bill by project and each project may have multiple cost codes for different types of work/areas of the project and Paycom is not at all set up to handle that kind of input.
 
Clockify may be worth a look as well. It was fairly robust when I rolled it out for a 20 person company a few years ago and only added features since.
 
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