Yay for Deb (And Way Too Much About Timekeeping)

Timekeeping is my bane at work.  I usually say “billing,” but really it’s the recording what I do part of things.  By neglecting it as I go along, I end up reconstructing, probably gipping myself out of a fair amount of revenue, and making it all the more stressful when it does come time to make sure I get paid.

One of the problems is the where and when I am when work happens, versus getting the data entered centrally.  If I am out and about, I would have to get to the office and remember exactly what and how long, and enter it.  One client calls me on the cell phone a lot.  Half of that never gets recorded.  How to be able to record time ASAP before I can forget?  How to save myself some of the work and stress?

Deb long ago volunteered to help me out, but we’d never set things up.  I realized that I can send e-mail from almost anywhere I am, be it from the cell phone, my normal account, or web mail while at a client site.  Not the first time I’d thought of this, but before I’d thought in terms of needing a program on the web that could take data via e-mail or web, from which I could download data come time to create bills.

Why take the complicated solution when the simple one will do?

I created a mail account exclusively for timekeeping.  Every time I do something billable, I e-mail it with the length of time, the category if it’s the big client, and the description.  If it happened on a date other than when the mail is sent, I add the date.  If I am putting it in on behalf of someone else, I add their name.  Otherwise the assumption is the date of work is the date of the mail and the person who did the work is the mail sender.  Everything gets e-mailed to that account, and we’ll let the mail remain on the server for an extended time as a raw source backup.

Effective with April 1 and beyond, Deb gets the mail from that account, enters the time, and may even create the bills each month.  Less stress for me.  A way to help me be more effective for her.  Because I e-mail it, if the phone happy client calls me and I am in the middle of nowhere, I can e-mail right from the phone that I just talked to him about X for whatever time (I use tenths of an hour).  I can e-mail from any machine that has internet and a web browser.  No more getting to the office, on one of the two machines with the software, and entering it there, or getting busy and never actually getting to do it.

I finally brought home the code for the program, modified it slightly, and created a distribution for the purpose.  Shared it on my machine and told Deb she should run the setup at some point.  Figured then I’d show her how to use it.

I’m still sick, and uncharacteristically for me, early this evening I crashed and napped for perhaps as much as two hours.  When I woke up, I was amazed to learn she had installed the program, setup the mail account in Thunderbird, and entered everything that I’ve sent so far this month.  Without being shown how to use it, and she’s right; it’s pretty self-explanatory.

Modified slightly to protect the innocent, here is what the program looks like.  Click for a larger one you can actually see:

Pretty simple.  On the left is a treeview of clients.  Under each is categories.  What is displayed is from my having toyed with keeping track of internal work.  You have to click a category under one or another client or the entry can’t be saved.  That’s two pieces of data.  The agent means who did the work.  I designed it so the person whose computer it runs on could set themselves as the default, since presumably they would be entering primarily their own time.  The date of work is what it sounds like, and clicking the arrow drops down a calendar to select.  It always defaults to today’s date when you load the program or when you click reset/clear.  Amount of time is what it sounds like.  You can only enter numbers and a maximum of one decimal point.  An early version of this had a start and stop, and could convert the duration between those two times into tenths, but that was overkill.  Description is, again, exactly what you’d expect.  In an ideal world, I would make these especially descriptive and tie into it as a knowledge base of what I did to fix what in the past, but oh well.  The save button is available once everything has been entered and is in the right format.

Since I am pretty sure I had to show at least one of my partners how to use this program, I guess that set my expectations low for the obviousness factor.

Then again, it’s not completely obvious.  The buttons, for instance.  The left one, the door, means exit the program.  So far so good.  The chainsaw dude is a new time entry form.  Hobbes is a new expense entry form.  The expense part is in practice never used.  In the treeview with clients and categories, you can’t add a client, but you can right-click and add a temporary category under a selected client.  I need to improve the program by making it all dynamic, but it works and hasn’t been a priority.  You can also get to the time and expense forms from the menu, or with ctrl-t and ctrl-e respectively.

I do like to make things user friendly as much as possible, and pay attention to the outward appearance.  Even little things like when you press the tab key it should go to the next logical place.  I hate pressing tab in a program and being baffled as to where I am.  I also like to have fun, at least with programs for internal use.  Thus the choices of icons.

This wasn’t supposed to be about the program though, or about my timekeeping woes per se.  It was supposed to be about how Deb rocks.

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