EnterYourHours.com: Owner & Worker

I use EnterYourHours.com for both my own business, and as a contractor for another company using EnterYourHours.com for their hourly tracking solution.  We’ll call that other company, TheBiz. 

 

TheBiz hires me to do one-off projects for their customers, so my hours need to show up on their invoices to clients.  To keep records and hourly billing organized, we decided it would be best for me to enter the hours at TheBiz.enteryourhours.com over my own account mycompany.enteryourhours.com.  This lets TheBiz create invoices with my hours on them without me having to invoice the hours from my system and pass them onto TheBiz. This saves at least one step in between. 

 

While the work being completed is being entered at, thebiz.enteryourhours.com, my running weekly hour totals on mycompany.enteryourhours.com are inaccurate. It’s something I have to be mindful of when I am checking to see how many billable hours I’ve logged between theBiz and ZapataData.

 

The advantages are in favor of TheBiz. TheBiz can adjust my hours before invoicing if needed, choose not to bill for certain items and track his hourly totals by contractor (me).

 

As a user of both sides of the system, I find it easy to see how much work I’ve done for theBiz, while still being able to see what my own business is doing without TheBiz in the mix.  Sure I could track hours in both places, but there’s no need to since I will never create an invoice for TheBiz and tracking the hours in my system will throw off running totals on the billing screen during invoice time.

Building a quote was too easy this morning…

A customer was looking for a quote on a specific project they had sent some specficiations for a few days back.  Realizing it had been left on ice, i needed to get to it ASAP.  After reviewing the spec, i was ready to build a quote on my EnterYourHours.com account.  I built the quote, reviewed the quote and emailed it in all of about 5 minutes.  I didnt have to go open word and overwrite iinformation in a template. It’s just done. And once the quote gets approved, i can convert it to an invoice and be done with it.

EnterYourHours.com Handles Credits Easily

Prior to starting with EnterYourHours.com, a web-based hourly billing software solution, I had a client pay me before their first official invoice.  At the time i wasn’t using QuickBooks, but needed a way to apply a credit to show them in one form or another (on paper) that i had received payment.  I looked around on various screens, but nothing was jumping out at me.  Being a programmer myself, I started to think: A credit could be defined as a negative price or negative fixed-price item, so I looked under the Fixed-Price Items tab on the Enter Hours screen.  And, just for the heck of it, I tried entering a negative number.  And there it went.

 

I was able to apply a credit to a client, without having any prior invoices or hours tracked in the system.  I ran bill batch to see how it would lok to the customer. By default, EnterYourHours.com adds these fixed-price items to your invoice as such:

 

            [FIXED-PRICE ITEM] – Descriptive Text Here

 

All I did for the “Fixed-Price/Expense Summary” was:

 

            [CREDIT] – Descriptive Text Here

 

So when I actually generated the invoice, the line item looked like:

           

            [FIXED-PRICE ITEM] – [CREDIT] – Descriptive Text Here

 

To my surprise, the invoice read out looked great and even showed the numbers in parentheses, standard designation for negative numbers in accounting. So after worrying EnterYourHours.com had missed a simple need, I realized it had inadvertently provided a solution that just took a little creative thinking to find.

 

I was asked by a friend and respected colleague to integrate a graphical user interface into some heavy database architecture and scripting for a new peice of software. After integegrating the interface, I saw the enormous potential it had to help me run my own consulting business.  I have been using EnterYoursHours.com as beta-tester since April 2008.  It has saved me countless hours of billing and tracking project hours. I don’t even think about billing until the day i need to email the invoices.  It truly is that simple.