bcToolkit Blog

It is of vital importance that a company is able to manage its time and bill their clients accurately in order to operate efficiently.

bcToolkit’s “Time by Client” report for Basecamp provides a business with the ability to assign billed time to their clients and monitor the progress of a job or project over a user defined time period. This feature allows bcToolkit users to identify opportunities to charge clients for work that might require more time than originally billed and generally monitor their project planning.

The “Time by Client” Basecamp report consists of 5 columns:

• Estimate
  This column displays the amount of time (in hours) that has been sold for each client. It is the whole time assigned to a client and can include multiple projects.
• Sales
  This column is the amount of time billed to a client multiplied by the hourly rate the bcToolkit user has set. This provides the user with the amount of sales revenue attributed to that project/client
• Actual
  The actual column displays the amount of time employees have put against their to-dos assigned to each client.
• Cost
  Like the Sales column this multiplies the time spent in the Actual column by the hourly rate to display the cost of the time spent on each client.
• Progress
  This column is important. By providing a quick way to see which clients are coming in under or over time in the date range the user has defined. As time is entered against to-dos by employees, the progress percentage increases. If a client’s progress is less than 100% then the time billed is more than the time spent, meaning that project is profitable. Equally important is if the progress goes over 100% which means that the project has either been undersold or the project is running into difficulties. Either way, you are now losing money on this project.

The “Time by Client” Basecamp reporting tool is great for any company that wants to accurately bill clients. It can provide analysis for sales teams as to where they can reduce prices or improve time estimates to save money. It also provides project managers with an insight into which clients might be a drain on employee resources.

bcToolkit also allows the user to drill down into each client’s information to see which projects belonging to them that are causing any time issues.