Once upon a time, I wrote a time tracking application for an employer which remained in use for nearly 10 years after I wrote it, counting up hundreds of thousands of billable man-hours of time for our OEM customers.  I loved writing it but I absolutely hated using it.  Like many engineers, I preferred getting work done to the tedious bureaucratic task of entering my time into a sheet, no matter how easy I made it to use.

Now, as a business owner, I recently started having some difficulty sticking to the schedules I set for myself and realized that a big part of the reason was due to a lack of time tracking.  I decided to bite the bullet and give it a shot.

The first thing you need to do is find a tool:  Sure you could use Excel, but it's certainly not ideal.  I did a quick search and found a great free application called ActiTime.  Their software runs locally or on a web server, powered with MS Access or MySQL under the hood.  It's fast, simple, and takes about 5 minutes to set up and start using.  It has simple reporting and exports CSVs into Excel for any kind of charting or analysis you can dream up.

The first week was a bit of a mess.  When you get excited about it you start imagining how wonderful it would be to have a detailed log of every minute spent, properly categorized into various customers, projects and categories, and end up with too much information.  Having had some practice, I decided to start over and began with a much simpler list of broad task categories.  This is the final list I came up with:

• Billable Work
• Branding
• Business Development
• Business Improvements
• Customer Support
• Marketing
• Money Management
• Networking
• Prospecting (In-Person)
• Prospecting (Online)
• Prospecting (Phone)
• Self-Improvement

Since this is a time tracking system for business, I decided to leave off anything personal that did not have any tangible benefit to the business.  This list is working out pretty well.

Here's an actual data-entry screen from ActiTime, it's pretty easy to use: 

Do you track time?  What have you learned?  Do you have any broad categories that I neglected to mention?  What software are you using?

Tweet @HaveAByte to share your experience.  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to track 15 minutes of my blogging time into Marketing, since I am spreading this around the TwitterVerse!

If this summarizes your current host, you should probably call us.

HaveAByte Offers Turn-Key Solution for Service Organizations

Dispatch scheduling and work order system for Windows, web browser, and mobile devices improves bottom line and enables company growth

Orange County, CA - December 28, 2008

HaveAByte.com has partnered with Ground Zero Tech-Works to offer an online “Software as a Service” solution for AyaNova - the #1 service management, dispatch scheduling and work order software.  AyaNova has enabled clients to organize their service-based businesses since 1996 in over 61 countries and more than 80 different types of businesses, and in use by many different services industries such as computer service, auto repair, plumbing, locksmith, alarm and security, HVAC, appliance repair, medical equipment repair, electronic repair, lawn care, property management, schools, municipal maintenance and many others. The solution offers interfaces for Windows, web browsers, and mobile browsers such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Palm devices which connect to a secure online database.

HaveAByte has reduced the total cost of ownership, and simplified the effort of deployment with their hosted solution.  Customers can use the entire system immediately without the cost of provisioning, configuring, updating, and securing an on-premises server.  The turn-key, hosted offering provides a fast, secure, easy to use system integrated with the customer’s website.

Customers benefit with:

• Significantly less time between services performed and customer payments received
• Reduced workload of management, dispatch, field agent, and accounting
• Increased revenues due to work orders not falling through the cracks
• Ability to scale to larger clients through improvements in pricing structures and policies
• Improved customer interaction by enabling clients to submit help requests via the web

This mature solution, currently at version 4.2, practically transforms small companies into professionally managed firms overnight, ensuring the adoption and improvement of solid workflows, procedures, and pricing structures.  Comparable enterprise solutions are cost prohibitive to small companies - AyaNova was developed for and priced appropriately for small to mid-market service organizations. Using mountains of paper to track billable service hinders growth, has an environmental impact, and causes work to go unbilled.  No service company can afford to leave money on the table like that, especially with today's economy.

Joomla has a problem with syndication, it is limited to the front page.  I found a very nice component for solving this, which also helps to promote Breast Cancer Awareness.

The BCA RSS Syndicator installs very cleanly into Joomla 1.5.7 and is simple to use. As you can see at the top of the HaveAByte Blog, there is an RSS 2.0 link. Unlike the built-in Joomla component, you can click which sections you want to Syndicate. 

It helps you make buttons, and provides the URLs to the feed, but it does not help you to place them anywhere on your site.  That is up to you.  So, I simply posted them into the Section header for the ol' blog here.

If I had one criticism, it would be the complaint that it is a bit cumbersome to have it generate an image, download it to my desktop, re-upload it into Joomla via the Media Manager, then edit a page and add the image and link to the feed myself.  It seems like it could easily generate the image, store it on the server in one of the image folders, and generate the ready-to-paste HTML.

The BCA RSS Syndicator is quick, simple, and it's pretty rare to tweak your website configuration and promote a worthy cause at the same time!

HaveAByte now has a NewsRoom for customers to report on server issues, maintenance and downtime, upgrades and similar things.  Link it into Google Reader, a Firefox Live Bookmark, or with whatever your favorite RSS reading application to get fast updates to HaveAByte goings-on.

UPDATE:  For some unknown reason the BCA RSS Syndicator stopped working, causing the feed links to simply show the same page.  I've removed it until I can find a fix.  If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear from you, but it's not a huge priority so I'm just disabling it for now.

We have been developing and hosting web sites and applications, as well as email, for over 11 years at HaveAByte.com, and email has always gone hand in hand with that.  For years, this has been fine and didn't require much effort.

I recently read an article about how DreamHost, a major web host, had started recommending their customers go to Gmail. Their reason was that half of their support requests were related to it.  This used to be a "set it and forget it" service.  Now we have major ISPs throwing up the white flag and sending customers elsewhere.

Email, despite having been around for 43 years, seems to be getting more difficult to manage technically.  This used to be something that was hard to screw up - almost anyone could set up an email server and provide the service.  Now, it takes serious effort to provide solid email services on an ongoing basis.