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TimeTrackingForConsultingCompanyDesignProblem

TimeTrackingForConsultingCompanyDesignProblem

title: TimeTrackingForAConsultingCompanyGeneral —

Time Tracking for a Consulting Company

A consulting company has a large percentage of traveling consultants. Currently, time and expenses are tracked by sending an email with an excel spreadsheet. This does not scale well and the company is experiencing heavy growth.

The fiscal year ends in 4 months and billing cycles are twice a month. A minimal time tracking system needs to be in place before then to allow consultants to start using the new system. Given the existing excel spreadsheets, we’d like to be able to continue using them though some kind of import functionality.

If we can get a web-based interface in place as well, all the better. However, we’d like to keep the spreadsheets as an option simply because it allows off-line time and expense tracking.



title: TimeTrackingForAConsultingCompanyProductOwner —

Time Tracking Product Owner

As the product owner, you are privy to more information. Feel free to revel this information as you are questioned.

  • Consultants typically work on a single project. However, they can work on up to 4 projects. This is handled by different pages in the existing spreadsheet. In the future, we’d like to allow for more than 4 projects.
  • Consultants only record actual billing time. We’d like to allow for more fidelity, e.g. travel, corporate contributions:
    • Corporate Contributions: Presenting at Conferences & User Groups, Publishing in magazines and books, Internal development such as course development, Certification
    • Travel Time: Billable & Non billable
    • Under Client time: Development, Mentoring, Infrastructure
  • Configurable email reminders would be handy
    • A formatted email, which could be replied to, to allow time tracking would be nice
  • All projects have a single engagement manger. The same engagement manager can manage multiple projects. Time sheets, once turned in, are reviewed by the engagement manager. Engagement managers need to be informed when the y have time sheets to improve. When all parts of a time sheet are approved (e.g. working on multiple projects), the time sheet is successfully completed.
    • All of this is true for expense reports.
  • Generating summary reports of hours worked on a project, billing clients, expense reports, etc. are were the real time-savings could happen. This is very important as we’re running out of capacity to keep up on a monthly basis.

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