When you work for a small IT company, you will have each tech invoice at the client's site when the job is completed. This may not have worked very well for you. Often jobs span many visits, the tech needs to run out for an emergency, etc., etc. As you may guess, you often run behind in invoicing. I personally believe that we should invoice on-site for small jobs (like one time clients), but invoice on a monthly basis for those clients that do not have a monthly service plan with you, but still require steady IT service throughout the year. Is this how most small IT companies do it, or is there a better way?

In order to accomplish monthly invoicing, you need to have our techs consistently and accurately record their time for each job. Would this be best done via a printed out weekly time sheet? Well, once you have this, you then need to aggregate all time sheets into one database.

The easiest option considered is using an Excel file to track your techs' time? Design the file to meet your requirements, including one for time accounting and one for providing call details (actions taken, parts used, etc.). We may not be familiar with how the data is entered into the pay system at corporate, but a CSV export imports into almost everything.

This is merely an example from a small industry of this various infrastructural setup across the globe. Everyone talks about employee time tracking. Here is an example of organizing the time tracking systems that fits the job profile as well. Small areas of wide industries, however can easily turn a successfully implemented system a total failure.

Paul

Resources:

Web Time Tracking

Time & Attendance Management

Online Timesheet