Tick Time Tracking in the New Basecamp
We love the new Basecamp! We also love time tracking (no surprise there). So when we heard the new Basecamp wasn’t going to include time tracking we set out to see what we could do…and honestly we kind of surprised ourselves. After working with some of the crew at 37signals and digging through the API as it was being developed, we stumbled upon the idea of creating a Basecamp App for time tracking. And of course we’re huge proponents of budget tracking so we had to include that as well.
So last night we pushed v1.0 of what we believe to be the first (new) Basecamp App. It gives you the ability to track your time, check on the budget status of your projects, flip between dates, review time entries of team members (Tick admins only), and more without ever leaving Basecamp.
We’re just a little excited to show it off. Hopefully the screencast below will get you excited as well!
Recurring Projects
Let’s say you have a client that pays you $1,000 each month for services. If you do 10 hours of work for them, that’s $100 per hour. But if you do 20 hours of work for them that’s $50 per hour. That’s a big difference and an important one when running a services shop that makes these type of retainer agreements.
So how can Tick help?
Now when you create a new a new project you’ll see a “recurring project” option at the bottom.
When you turn this on, Tick will automatically close the existing project at the end of the month and open a new (identical) project. So if you want to make $100 per hour on that $1,000 per month client, you just set a project budget of 10 hours and check the recurring project feature. Now each time you log a time entry to that project you’ll get real-time feedback on your $100 per hour goal.
You can still add tasks (and task budgets) as you would any other project and they will carry over into the new project at the end of the month. Recurring projects also automatically get a little custom naming convention to help keep everything well organized. A project with the name “Website Development” for example, will display as “Website Development | 2012-02” indicating that this is the February 2012 version.
We hope this helps, and as always feel free to drop us an email if you have any questions.
Send Invoices From Tick
Tick, the webs best time and budget tracker, has teamed up with FreshBooks, the webs best invoicing application. The FreshBooks + Tick integration is a simple way to pull your time entries from Tick and convert them into professional invoices in FreshBooks. FreshBooks is a great tool for sending, tracking and collecting payments quickly.
Enabling the FreshBooks + Tick integration within Tick will provide you with a new export option on your reports screen. This link will launch the FreshBooks + Tick importer. Once you setup the account settings, professional invoices are just a few clicks away.
My Open Projects (New Options)
We pushed a little update to the My Open Projects page last week. Prior to the update this screen would show a list of projects that you owned (for admins) or were assigned to (for non-admins). That worked pretty well, but we didn’t love the inconsistency and we heard from many admins that they would prefer to see the list of projects they were assigned to instead.
So here’s what we came up with. When an admin user now visits the My Open Projects screen there is a new select menu at the top that lets you switch between projects you own, projects you’re assigned to, or all open projects. Whatever option you prefer will become your default view each time you return to the page…and of course you can still filter the list by client.
Remember that all the sub-pages of the Projects tab default to the last view you selected before you left the projects section. So if you haven’t checked out the My Open Projects page in awhile you may want to take another look.
Enjoy!
Advanced Basecamp Integration in Tick
We’ve been working pretty hard on advancing the Basecamp integration within Tick, and last week we rolled out a big update. We’re happy to announce that you can now import projects, people and Basecamp time entries directly into Tick.
This update officially knocks the top couple items off our feature request list. We worked pretty closely with a couple of customers to make sure we had this right before the bona fide launch…so once again our hats tip to those who offered their time and feedback.
Take a look at the video below, to see Tick and Basecamp in action.
Locking Time Entries
Tick now includes the ability to lock and unlock time entries. We hope you find many uses for this new functionality, but a couple stand out for sure.
Let’s talk about billing first
When you run a report within Tick with the intention of creating an invoice, you’ll want to make sure you only include time entries that haven’t been billed yet. Typically you can just filter by date, but what if someone went back and entered more time after you sent that last invoice? This is where locking can help.
You can now run a report (filtering as much as necessary) and when you have the data you need (exported, printed, sent to FreshBooks, etc.) you can lock those entries. The link is on the bottom left side of the reports screen…
Locking entries does a couple of things. First of all you can filter reports based on the locked or unlocked status. Beyond that, locked entries can no longer be edited or deleted. Which is a nice segway into another great way to use this feature.
Time approvals and working with contractors
Depending on your business set up, you may need to “approve” time entires or prevent people from making changes to entries after a certain time. The locked feature can help here as well. For example: If a contractor is working on a project and you bill that time to a client (and/or pay the contractor), locking those time entries will ensure your records cannot be edited or deleted. A very good thing indeed.
So there it is. We hope you like it and if you have any feedback don’t hesitate to let us know.
A Better Print View
Tick now includes a really nice print view, accesible from the reports section. This update was highly requested and customer driven. Thanks to all of you who helped us get this right.
* It also makes a nice little report (save as PDF) for clients that require all the details…
Reporting: New Date Range Preset
We just pushed a small little update to the reporting section of Tick. The date range presets now include an option to select “All Dates.” Should be handy when you’re looking for big trends over the life of your subscription.
Hope this helps.
Why Tick Matters
One of the recurring themes of our interactions with new users is what makes Tick different? A more direct way of asking some of the same questions is: Why does Tick matter? Let’s be honest, there are a lot of time tracking applications out there. Some do a lot, others do a little. Some do it well, and some…..not so well. So why does Tick matter?
When we first decided to create tick, it had much less to do with time tracking than it did with hitting budgets. If we’re honest, tracking your time is simple. You can do it in your head, on a legal pad, in Excel or in some other homegrown application that you decided to build to make your life easier. And if we’re REALLY honest, tracking time is a waste of time….if it’s being tracked simply for the sake of tracking it. But budgets (time budgets) are rarely simple, and not always easy to track or hit.
When we were doing custom web work we were forced to learn a painful lesson. Time is a perishable commodity. Every hour of the work day was inventory that we couldn’t get back once it passed. And our budgets were contingent upon us not wasting inventory. That’s the service industry in a nutshell with all its joys and pains. In order to be successful (or simply keep the lights on) we had to hit our budgets. Sure, we could pull all-nighters and get the job done by its deadline, but if we ended up over the amount of time we allotted to the project, we were robbing time from our team. From their hobbies, families or their preferred minimum hours of sleep.
After some soul searching, we figured out our problem wasn’t so much on the side of our estimation efforts, and it wasn’t so much that we weren’t tracking our hours well. It boiled down to communication; our teams not knowing how many hours they had left on the project.
So why does Tick matter? It isn’t so much that Tick tracks your time (though it does), and it isn’t that Tick can help you create better estimates (though it will do that too). It’s simply that Tick allows everyone to know how much inventory is left on the shelves. If it’s getting thin, everyone knows it. If there’s extra, they know that too. Tick encourages and empowers team members by disseminating the critical information to the entire team. It’s not tracking time simply for the sake of tracking it. It’s tracking time with the end goal of nailing your budget. It allows people to know exactly where they stand, where they can lend a hand or when they need to work faster. When you’re willing to view hours as inventory, and everyone has a key to the storeroom, it will be much easier to produce products on time and on budget. That’s important. And that’s why Tick matters.
