Suggestions after lots of use

[dpeace]

Hi.

I'm now managing my business entirely in iOS, using Time Master and Easy Books.

Now that I've been using Time Master for a while, there are a couple of suggestions that would make things easier for me.

1. Recurring charges. This is my biggest problem with Time Master. I have some chargeable items which recur each month, and I've found myself forgetting to enter them on a monthly basis, and then having to spend time looking back over old invoices. Setting such things up once and having them automatically generated each month would save me an enormous amount of time (and would make my clients think that I'm more on top of things!).

2. Toggle for automatic uploading of generated invoices to Dropbox. It's a pain having to manually upload them one at a time, particularly since the Dropbox list of invoices needs to refresh each time before uploading.

3. I'm sometimes finding that I'm missing billing a client. As an example, if I do a couple of hours' work in May, and decide to incorporate that in a July invoice, the default auto-invoice setting would only include the last month's charges. I sometimes forget to manually change the start date to the 1st of May. It would be great if there was a button below the start and end date fields for This Year; although I personally don't use the Today and Yesterday buttons, I'm sure others do, so being able to change these buttons in the preferences would be excellent. Alternatively, an optional pop-up warning that there are earlier outstanding chargeable items when generating an invoice automatically would be very helpful.

4. The ability to search the reference fields of both outstanding and paid invoices would save me an awful lot of time.

5. Some sort of (perhaps) graphical analysis would be very helpful; the ability to, for example, list clients in order of promptness of payment would be great.

I would be prepared to pay extra for all of these things if it were not cost-effective for you to offer them as a free update.

Best,

Darren

[Adam]

Hi Darren,

Hi.

I'm now managing my business entirely in iOS, using Time Master and Easy Books.

Now that I've been using Time Master for a while, there are a couple of suggestions that would make things easier for me.

1. Recurring charges. This is my biggest problem with Time Master. I have some chargeable items which recur each month, and I've found myself forgetting to enter them on a monthly basis, and then having to spend time looking back over old invoices. Setting such things up once and having them automatically generated each month would save me an enormous amount of time (and would make my clients think that I'm more on top of things!).

A very interesting suggestion.  I can see how this could be useful for some people.  I will add this to our "wish list".

2. Toggle for automatic uploading of generated invoices to Dropbox. It's a pain having to manually upload them one at a time, particularly since the Dropbox list of invoices needs to refresh each time before uploading.

Ok.  What I'm thinking is perhaps a way to "send all" if the Status is Pending.  That would go for either Email, Print or Dropbox.  It would then ask you to mark as Billed when it is finished.  I'm not sure how easily this would doable or not, but will also add this to the "wish list".

3. I'm sometimes finding that I'm missing billing a client. As an example, if I do a couple of hours' work in May, and decide to incorporate that in a July invoice, the default auto-invoice setting would only include the last month's charges. I sometimes forget to manually change the start date to the 1st of May. It would be great if there was a button below the start and end date fields for This Year; although I personally don't use the Today and Yesterday buttons, I'm sure others do, so being able to change these buttons in the preferences would be excellent. Alternatively, an optional pop-up warning that there are earlier outstanding chargeable items when generating an invoice automatically would be very helpful.

Yes, I do the same thing as I have a "Minimum Amount" set so I don't bill Clients with very small balances.  What I do is leave the Start Date set to Jan 1st of that year (or even prior years, as it doesn't really matter as all you want to do is catch any old un-billed entries).  I just set the End Date to the last day of the month.  The reason that you would want do do this is that the Invoice Date is taken from the End Date.  You wouldn't want to set it for the Year as your invoice date would always end up being Dec 31st.  So you will basically just be changing one date field before auto creating the invoices.

4. The ability to search the reference fields of both outstanding and paid invoices would save me an awful lot of time.

You can search these, but you need to do it in the main Time Entries screen.  Just pull the list down.  That will reveal the Search box.  Please note that Invoices do not have any Time or Expense entries in them, so you must search from the Time or Expense entry screens.

5. Some sort of (perhaps) graphical analysis would be very helpful; the ability to, for example, list clients in order of promptness of payment would be great.

Yes, we do want to do some sort of analytics module.  This has been requested by quite a few people.  What we really need to do is try and figure out what kinds of things people need to see, so suggestions for this are very helpful.

I would be prepared to pay extra for all of these things if it were not cost-effective for you to offer them as a free update.

Many of the features we add we do are included as free updates.  Only things that take a considerable amount of time to develop are the things that we need to recoup our time by charging for.  These are the "optional modules" we create.  The analytics module may be one of those things that we may need to charge a small fee for.  We still need to try and figure out what people need for this module and will try to include as much as possible.  Thanks again for taking the time to write us and let us know what you think.  It is VERY helpful!

Cheers,
Adam.

[dpeace]

1. I'm considering moving to a retainer basis for a couple of difficult clients, so this would be very handy for that.

2. "Send All" for status pending or billed would be fantastic.

3. I can see where to set the Minimum Amount when auto-invoicing - is there another setting that can be global for either all clients, or one specific client? This would be very useful.

4. Doh! I should read the manual. If I'd spotted that yesterday, it would have saved me about an hour of rummaging through printed invoices.

5. I suppose I'm really thinking of the sort of data that Easy Books produces. Trial balance, profit & loss and VAT returns would all be beyond the scope of Time Master, I'm sure, but given that the payment dates are applied, the ability to display an average time per client to settle accounts would be useful. Also, a monthly average income from each client would be good to know. I appreciate that this sort of information can be yielded by exporting a CSV to Excel (and this is what I do), but having the ability to get a quick idea from within TM would not only streamline my job prioritising, but would also sell more copies of TM to my own clients. Whenever I demo, they tend to prefer something more initially flashy such as Billings Touch, but after a bit of perseverance, I'm able to demonstrate that TM is much more powerful. I suppose that some people are intimidated by lots of options screens (and several have said that they would prefer to have one big START / STOP button on the screen to toggle a selected Task line - I counter this by saying that they can have multiple simultaneous timers with TM).


Thanks again for the single program that justified my initial iPhone purchase (I bought all the modules, although I only use the invoicing - it seemed reasonable to do so in exchange for the value I get out of TM), and caused me to stick with iOS when I couldn't find anything of similar quality for Android.

Darren