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I really like this. Hadn't seen it before. But it appears to be missing what I would regard as being a key piece of functionality: Expenses. We tend to bill t
by buro9 17y ago
I really like this. Hadn't seen it before.
But it appears to be missing what I would regard as being a key piece of functionality: Expenses.
We tend to bill time and expenses. Indeed the standard contract we operate under is T&M, time and materials.
Materials being travel, accommodation, and stuff like that as well as material in more real terms.
Your time UI looks great, but we already have a really ugly time UI that we'll be sticking with. Why? Because the system that stores the expenses is more critical than the system that stores time.
We can accept a margin of error and a overhead on submission of time reports, but for invoicing and billing we cannot accept such things when it comes to expenses. One of these things goes into the company filings, one does not.
I would love to be able to utilise your time UI, but to do so necessitates some way of extending it to also track expenses.
Expenses relate to time because they occur in a moment of time and are nearly always directly attributable to what you were working on at that time.
i.e. a taxi for a meeting with client X. Verisign Code Certificate for a piece of code for client Y. Hotel whilst visiting client Z.
So it makes sense to record your expense when you incur it... or to enter your expenses at the end of the month (when you get your credit card statement) and then for the date to imply the client.
Perhaps you should be looking at partnering on this front? Maybe pick out someone like Buxfer and see if they're keen to work towards owning the books for small and medium companies?
Doing this stuff would allow you to also build profitability reports. If you know 3 people work for client X, that you invoiced amount A and that your expenses are amount B... then you know how profitable 3 people are for the time allocated. Important stuff for freelancers and those offering services where time tracking and invoicing matters.
Just some ideas. Very much like what I see.
- julias 17y agoThanks for your great input! We'd love to keep the tool easy, therefore we'll keep focusing on tracking and analyzing time only. That said, you're totally right: partnering makes sense. Therefore, we do offer an API. Three invoicing apps already integrated mite to realize exactly the combination you mentioned. We hope some others will follow, it's so great to see tools working together, each focusing on its very own strenghs!
- nico 17y agoI was wondering... is it really worth it to have an API? Do you have many customers who use it? would those customers not be your customers if it weren't for the API? Thanks!
- julias 17y agoI can't prove that with numbers, but oh yes, we think the API is one of our key "success" points! One, the API helped us a great deal in terms of features / suporting different plattforms. Have a look: http://mite.yo.lk/en/platform/ http://mite.yo.lk/en/platform/ – this is only possible because of our API, we couldn't have done that by ourselves, with a tiny team. Two, integrating 3rd party products helps to spread the word about your service, especially, when the customer base is a pretty different one. Customer wise: a pretty decent part of our customers makes use of our API to integrate intranet tools and the like. And it's a plus to highlight that we don't lock the data of our customers in. But if they hadn't become customers if we didn't have an API? Not sure about that.
- nico 17y agoI guess that last question is pretty hard to answer, but from what you say I can tell there's a lot of value to your customers in the API, hence it looks likes it is worth it. Thank you for your reply and congratulations for your success, I hope you keep growing and being profitable!
- sunir 17y agoHey Julias, you should join http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com if you're looking to find a good group of people building the market through integrations. We'll be working on time tracking data standards later this year in fact. P.S. You should integrate with FreshBooks. (Guess where I work :)
- julias 17y agoThanks for pointing us to the SBW, sunir. We did stumple upon it already, but will explore it further.