If you use Basecamp from 37signals as a project management tool, and we strongly recommend you give it a go, then we would like to plant a couple of questions in your mind.

1. Why should you connect the time you and your team are spending on projects to the monetary budgets set?
2. Why do you need to know whether you are over or under budget?

Using bcToolkit as a Basecamp reporting tool gives you the answers to both these questions above but why do you need this information?

As far as Q1 is concerned in an environment where you sell only your time then the easiest habit to slip into is over delivering to keep your customer satisfied. There is a stage before this though and that is actually knowing that you are over delivering in the first place and then understanding by how much. Only then can you do something about it. bcToolkit gives you that information by allowing you to assign budgets to Basecamp todos and projects and then analysing the time entered against each to do and comparing it in real time, to the budget you allocated. This performs a fundamental connection. It gives you a progress report in terms of money not just time. So for example bcToolkit will tell you that you have used 80% of you monetary budget but you are on 50% through the project in terms of time. Now it maybe that the budget is front loaded in the project but at least you have the data instantly to evaluate this. In complex projects with many todos in Basecamp you can also see which todos are on schedule and which are not. You can also track an individual’s efficiency at delivering todos within budget.

In answering Q2, we will only discuss being over budget because that is where losses result. If you are under budget the time and therefore money not spent just drops to profit. Firstly, finding out you are over budget at the end of a project is not really any good as it is difficult to go back to your customer and try to sell extra time after the fact. Using bcToolkit gives you daily Basecamp reports that will alert you to the fact that you are about to go over budget, this gives you more time to negotiate more budget from you client while the project is ongoing. Secondly, you will get a view on why you went over for future reference. So for example, it maybe that one person is a slower worker and in future you will have to build in more cost to similar projects to allow for that. Or it may be that certain tasks simply take more time than you allowed so the next time you will know to allocate more time to these particular tasks.

Overall, linking time to money in a service-based business is fundamental to understanding job costing and has a direct impact on profitability. Using bcToolkit as your Basecamp reporting tool will enable you to get so much more information from your Basecamp data enabling you to make business-changing decisions towards increased profitability.

Firstly stuff we’ve done. You can now use bcToolkit in 3 currencies Yay! $, £ and Euros. We have improved the “manage categories” section so it is less techy and more user friendly. OK we admit we are quite geeky and the interface reflected that, but not anymore. We have also added some help points at various places within bcToolkit especially when uploading xml data.

So what’s to come? Well, 3 updates are on the horizon. The big update will be to add date range selection functionality on Time by Category report, Time by User report & Time by Project report. This means you will be able to get a view of time spent today, last week or last year or any date range you wish for example. Also we will add change username and password facility. And finally we are investigating an auto-notification message when a project or todo in Basecamp is about to go over budget.

We think those are some great updates. As ever if you have any others please send them to jon@bctoolkit.com and we will gladly take a look at your suggestions

Using bcToolkit to categorize Basecamp projects via the Basecamp API you can then run a simple report that calculates the time spent in each category you have assigned. For example we have a client who is a digital agency and they categorised each project into either 1/. Client projects 2/. New business investment 3/. Internal management 4/. Internal Marketing and 5/. Internal Training

What they discovered was that they were spending far more time on new business and marketing than they had imagined and budgetted for. Consequently they were able to set a rationalised fixed monthly budget for pitching that concentrated their efforts on prospects they really had a good chance of getting instead of pitching for everything.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused

Here at bcToolkit putting time into a certain category was one of the fundemental pieces of functionality that we thought we could add to the already great resource that Basecamp is from our friends at 37Signals. By the way you can retrospectively categorize your time via bcToolkit back into your Basecamp data in 3 easy steps if you wish.  And of course time which is spent but not billed can be in many forms, such as straightforward management time, marketing time, investement time in pitching for new business to name but a few. So now bctoolkit customers can see just how much time is spent on internal meetings or even better some of our customers now know exactly how much time on average they spend on marketing which allows them to budget more effectively. Finally and just as informative from a business perspective is tha fact that bcToolkit customeres are now discovering how much it costs them to pitch for certain types of projects.

Time not billed can also be in the form of going over budget or scope creep as well but we will address that in our next blog. Watch this space.

We are constantly looking for feedback on bcToolkit from all you guys using the tool and we will feedback updates via Twitter so follow us on @bctoolkit

If you use Basecamp from 37Signals, whilst it is great for the project management bit and we know we have been using it for 3 years now, it doesn’t provide you with the opportunity to measure your productivity. That’s where we bcToolkit comes in.

The bcToolkit dashboard

In this post I want to talk about variance. By variance I mean the average difference between what you budgeted in time to complete a project and what you actually took to do the project. When we looked into this from a digital agency’s perspective using bcToolkit we found some staggering results that helped change the way they worked. This was sparked by a comment from an Agency owner who said “I am not bothered by going a few hours over on small jobs.” Firstly we found that often the variance was different depending on the type of project. For example small projects i.e. those with a 2 hour budget would take 3 hours worth of effort. That’s 50% over budget. Whereas longer projects of say 50 days were taking on average 52 days to complete. That’s only 4% over. Ok well what’s an hour here or there I hear you say as did the agency owner. Well if your business sells 1000 jobs per year that are 2 hours long and on average they actually take 3 hours that’s a 1000 hours lost and a significant drain on profitability.

Using bcToolkit to analyse Basecamp data changed they way that digital agency worked. They focussed on the small jobs and developed a new process to deliver them and they are now on or under budget on every small job. bcToolkit saved the agency £1000’s in lost profit by enabling the them to sell the time they were otherwise losing.

bcToolkit time by category dashboard

We use the Basecamp API to turn your Basecamp data into a productivity dashboard that gives you vital project management data about time spent vs time estimated for example. You can even populate your Basecamp data with estimates of time for projects or todo’s via bcToolkit. Once your Basecamp data has been categorised you can then produce reports vital to project management KPIs on how much time you are spending on marketing or investment or management or admin or actually on projects themselves. This will enable you to understand your overall percentage recoverable time i.e. time billed vs time available.

Don’t forget we are offering the first month’s subscription to bcToolkit is free, so sign up today and if you know any other Basecamp users then please spread bcToolkit word.

New auto-upload feature

bcToolkit now automatically pulls all of your Basecamp data through the Basecamp API each evening meaning you no longer have to go through the process of downloading XML files and then uploading into bcToolkit.

New Account Settings page

New Account Settings page

You can access the new account settings page from the bcToolkit dashboard. Here you can change your Basecamp URL, hourly rate, company name and cancel your account.

New token authentication

37Signals have recently introduced a new token-based authentication system for all of their products. This means that you can log into multiple 37Signals products using one login. We’ve updated bcToolkit so it now accepts these new tokens when you register. If you’re already a member, you can enter your token within the account settings page at the time when 37Signals make it compulsory to have one.

Ability to add time to a project

Previously, bcToolkit used only time that was entered against to-do items to perform its calculations. After listening to our customers, we found that many of you add time to a project itself and not the to-do items; so we’ve updated bcToolkit to now use all time, however it’s logged.

We hope you enjoy using the new features!