You're probably here in search of a better way to enter a timesheet, manage expense reports, track projects or invoice your clients.

These sorts of activities are repetitive. They require many numerical calculations and must often be performed on a daily basis.

If you're doing activities that are repetitive, frequent and mathematically intense AND you're human, you're going to make mistakes. Timesheet, expense report, invoicing and billing mistakes are expensive - in terms of time to fix, delayed and missed receivables, upset employees, incorrect taxes and negative client perceptions.

What is your solution?
The first software solution that everyone chooses is an Excel spreadsheet. It's a dynamite application that's available just about everywhere. And if you're working on your own, it provides some of the solution.

"The problem is that Excel is really just a paper report with a built-in calculator." There is no reliable and robust way to use many spreadsheets together at the same time. As an example, perhaps you've kept your timesheets in Excel, one for each week. If you want a project summary, you'll have to open up many files and pull calculated numbers from each timesheet into yet another spreadsheet. If you have many projects you're right back to the beginning again - manually doing repetitive, complex and important calculations.

This problem also shows up when your team gives you their weekly timesheet spreadsheets so you can calculate the client invoice or the vacation report for HR. Typically, even for small consulting firms, several days are required each month to manually collate these many timesheets into invoices and issue them.

Some companies stay with this spreadsheet system, often for the simple reason that they don't realize that other solutions exist.

Other companies, particularly software consulting firms, may decide to write their own solution. But because of the high quality, flexible and inexpensive commercial solutions that are now available, this is not a cost effective solution. Whether you write it yourself, or get someone else to make it for you, custom software is always many times more expensive than commercially available software simply because of the economy of scale.

Many companies do realize that there is time and expense report management software. However they are "very busy right now" and they don't feel that it's important to convert to a new system. Yet using the new browser-based software requires virtually no training and often less than a day of work is needed to configure the software for the company.

But what about companies that do use timesheet and expense report software?

A major competitive advantage
The bottom line fact is that according to the American Payroll Association, companies that use timesheet software have reduced their payroll expenses by three to five percent. This is a major competitive advantage. And it's not the only one. They also gain billable time, simplify project management and reduce their receivables cycle. More subtly, they acquire a database of information which can be readily analyzed for tighter project costing, employee performance analysis and future revenue and expense management. The payoff is immediate.

Web-based multi-user collaborative software
As you've seen in your research, there are two types of time and expense management software:

1. Personal single user software: This is software that runs on a PC or a Palm-type device. It'll track your time and expenses, but has no collaborative or multi-user capabilities.
   
2. Multi-user software. This software allows many people to simultaneously manage their time and expense data. There are two components to this software - the server software and the client software. The server software manages the collaborative multi-user access to the database. It runs on a server computer, which is just a more powerful computer. The client software is installed on each user (client) computer and is used to access the server software across a network.
   
   Microsoft Outlook is an example of the traditional specialized client software. But now, the best products are web-based so users just need an Internet browser. This results in tremendous cost-savings and flexibility for customers since most computers have browsers already on them. Client support and maintenance is virtually eliminated and team members can update their timesheets and issue expense reports from their desk or across the Internet.
   
   Online Timesheet Management System is a multi-user web-based timesheet, expense report, invoicing and billing application.

Critical success factors
For you to make your choice, these are some important differentiating factors you should consider.

1. How many users are in your organization? Some products have a single price independent of the number of users. Other products base the price on the number of users.
2. What additional software is required for the product to run? Some products need expensive relational databases and operating systems. This extra software increases the licensing cost, drives up the server size and requires greater installation and maintenance skills.
3. What level of customization and integration is required? If you are generating 10 invoices per month, you won't need the tight integration with accounting that a company that generates 1000 invoices per month wants. Some companies with unique customization requirements want the actual source code so they can tightly integrate their systems. Other companies just need to customize the user interface - i.e. lawyers would typically use the word "case" instead of "project"
4. Do you want to generate invoices for client billing? Some products do not include invoicing capabilities. Often you'll want invoice formats specific to your company.
5. What level of support do you want? Is email support sufficient or are you willing to pay for 24x7 telephone support. Frequently the first year support costs are included in the license fee. What are the support costs year over year? You could send in some questions to support (not sales) just to test each company's responsiveness.
6. Does your accounting system require value-added tax (VAT) information for revenue and expenses? Some products do not track these taxes.
7. Do you want to enter time with "stop-watch" controls? For many professionals, such as lawyers, this, along with minimum billable time chunking is a critical usability issue.
8. Do you want to track project actuals against plan? Since all of the "actuals" are being collected by the timesheet component of the software, it makes sense to use this information to track this information against project plans. Does the product have a convenient way of entering project forecasts and what management reports are available?