Time Tracker

Managing the tasks, schedules and billing for over 30 staff and 20 active projects often becomes complex. Organisations similar to Alliance employ multiple administrative staff to manually handle such processes. With 20 years experience helping our clients streamline their business, we wanted to do it for ourselves too.

The Challenge

There are a number of complex requirements of an ERP platform for a software services business, including:

• Sophisticated Scheduling

  Managers need to report on projects and set staff schedules for the short & medium term

• Shared Client Access

  Clients need to see the status of their work in real time

• Clarity for Staff

  Staff need a clear dashboard to direct them as well as simple interfaces to record time worked.

• Finance Automation

  Finally, accounting staff want to automate creation of invoices & export them to Xero. Finance also hoped to automate common administrative tasks such as leave applications.

Our Approach

We’ve taken an iterative approach to building TimeTracker. Beginning with just the time recording tool, the platform has evolved to meet all of the above and more. We have a culture of continuous improvement and our staff regularly identify enhancement opportunities.

Our General Manager maintains a running list of feature ideas and grades each by impact (e.g. time saved) and cost (e.g. hours to implement). Every quarter we seek to deliver those with greatest impact.

The Results

The TimeTracker now “runs” Alliance Software. Finance staff tell us that billing takes less time for 35 staff than it did when we had just three! Project managers set staff schedules together in just 30 minutes per week.

Our staff are happier too. Before they often had to constantly swap between multiple clients in a day. Now, with better scheduling, they have a clear runway to do their best work.