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Project Management

Manage Projects Like a Boss Inside Your Time and Billing Software

Manage Projects Like a Boss Inside Your Time and Billing Software - BQE Software


There are several areas within BillQuick Online that help you manage your projects. Before we dive into this, let's look at why you would want to manage your projects in BillQuick Online. I know that many people think of BillQuick Online as a regular Time and Billing Software. The fact is, BillQuick Online is also an incredibly robust project management software.

I frequently hear people asking for features in their project management software, that enable them to manage things easily across all projects. One thing people ask me frequently, is to see a schedule, of employees, projects, and hours, so they can determine who might be over-burdened, vs. who may have time in their schedule. If you are using BillQuick, or BillQuick Online, then your time and billing software gives you that.

To answer the question above, why would you use BillQuick, or BillQuick Online to manage your projects, I would propose another question. Why wouldn't you? I can point to many examples of apps that try to do too many things that aren't closely related enough. Those products usually wind up doing, at best, and adequate job of each thing.

Time and Billing Software, like BillQuick and BillQuick Online addresses several areas that go hand in hand. Time and expense tracking, are part and parcel to any project that you might work on for any client. You will use that same information to bill your clients, and as long as you have all of the information that makes up a "project" it seems sort of crazy not to do it all in one place. You see, this is NOT a case of an application trying to be too many things.

Let's break it down like this.

In any service business, here's what it looks like at a generic level:

  • Clients
    • Projects
      • Tasks / To Do Items = Time
        • Allocation (who's doing what?)
        • Due Dates (when does it need to be done?)
        • Reminders (because finding out that it's due today, is often way too late.)
      • Documents
      • Expenses
        • Reimbursement
      • Billing
        • Fixed Fees
        • Time & Materials
        • Scheduled

I could probably go on, but this should be enough to demonstrate how "Project Management" is integral to any time and billing software that you use. If anything, using two separate applications for project management and time and billing, will likely create an unnecessary disconnect.

Now let's look at what BillQuick Online offers, in terms of how to manage projects like a boss.

Clients and Projects

If you go to your clients list in BillQuick Online, you'll see that you can easily expand each client, to show the projects that you have for each client. For some of you, it will be one project per client, but for many of you, there will be more.

Tasks and To Do's

For starters you can create tasks / to do's all day long. In fact you can have General tasks (not project specific) as well as project specific tasks. This is the obvious way to handle the project management part.

Budgets

This one may have you turning your head a bit to the side, but hear (or read) me out. Your budgets, in BillQuick Online consist of your activity codes and expenses. For the activity codes, you are going to assign the number of hours each activity will take to complete. Then you'll figure in the cost and bill rates, to see what your profit will be on the project.

Your budget can also include the expenses you will expect to incur. Then it's a matter of whether or not you will bill those expenses back to your client, and whether or not you need to mark up those expenses when you do bill them back.

Aren't the activity codes in the budget essentially the tasks that you need to complete in order to get the job done? You might use the tasks and to do's feature to handle some of the intermediary tasks, but by and large, your budget HAS your tasks built in.

Allocation

Once I have defined my project's tasks, I want to allocate the tasks to the individuals who will be responsible for getting them done. I can do this with To Do's, but I can also use BillQuick Online's allocation feature, which works beautifully in tandem with my budgets.

The allocation screen makes it very easy to see, and adjust, who's doing what, across all projects, and all employees.

Watch the video above and see what all of this looks like.

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