Fitting the bill

COMPANIES THAT BILL for their employees’ time are often burdened by resource-intensive activities that require close supervision. Otherwise those companies would end up losing control over deadlines or billable time. Many project-control solutions, such as Microsoft Project, are good for planning and reporting on tasks and resources but don’t normally provide billing functionality or are not accessible to outside parties.

For companies facing these obstacles, Net Theory now offers a promising hosted application called Work Theory. The solution combines project management, time sheet management, and document sharing under an originally designed, browser-contained GUI that includes capabilities to automatically generate invoices for each project.

One of the best aspects of Work Theory is its easy implementation and use. Net Theory offers a free, 60-day trial that you can start, as we did, after filling out a short, online registration form. Work Theory’s strength lies in its integrated project control and time-billing system that can produce accurate customer invoices at a reasonable cost. But some of the features need refining.

The registration process let us choose our master user ID and password. After we created a dedicated account, we received instructions, sent automatically via e-mail, about how to access it. In a few minutes we were logged in with administrative privileges, which included adding users, projects, and customers. We could also personalize invoices with a company logo, a must-have feature. Interestingly, opening a new account creates a personalized URL such as “yourcompany.worktheory.com” that you point at to access use the service.

Setting up Work Theory basically involves defining your customers and the projects that your company is conducting on their behalf, detailing which tasks need to be carried out for each project, and assigning users to them.

Accessing Work Theory with their browsers, users enter time sheets detailing time spent on each activity. A user with billing authority can then automatically create invoices for each project using those time sheets as billable items.

The process is easy to manage. Work Theory has many useful features, such as logging user activity, attaching documents to each task, and automatically notifying users. The application helps maintain control of projects and keep everybody on the same page.

Work Theory has a captivating and unusual user interface that offers quick access to its main features: performing administrative tasks, adding projects, defining teams, entering time sheets, and preparing and printing invoices.

New users can quickly familiarize themselves with the application by using Guided Tour, an agent that leads through major functionality, or by accessing online help for assistance.

We added new users to our settings, assigning to each person resource attributes, such as availability and access to specific projects. Unless set up differently, Work Theory assumes that each new user is a company employee and generates an additional monthly fee to use the service. However, you can define an unlimited number of nonemployee users, such as contractors or consultants, for free because Net Theory currently doesn’t charge a fee for them.

As soon as we created our users, Work Theory automatically sent them e-mail containing log-in instructions.

We then logged in as a regular user and found the list of tasks for each project. Surprisingly, each task had a status of “open” rather then “assigned.” Responding to a quick e-mail, Net Theory technical support explained that this is intentional because it helps maintain control over user-defined activities. The status of each task has to be changed manually by a user with project administration privileges. From our administrator account, we changed the status of each task to assigned, then logged in again as regular user.

The main role of project members using Work Theory is to accurately describe how they spent their time on each project and task, using online time sheets. Users can also enter their time off, including vacation and sick leave, which gives a project administrator a comprehensive view of the available manpower. Users with billing authority can review and approve those time sheets and automatically create invoices listing the activities billed for each customer’s project.

Entering the time spent on each project by our fictitious user was easy: From dropdown lists, we chose the project and the task, then selected the date from a calendar, and marked the beginning and ending time for our activity. We were less thrilled when we simulated vacation time for our users, because Work Theory forces you to input your time-sheet entries one day at a time — a potential nuisance. We filled in a few time sheets for each user then moved to create an invoice.

Logged in as an administrator, we pointed to bill management, which listed the billable user time for each project and gave us the option of removing items from the invoice. We assigned an invoice number, entered the cost per hour of each user and in seconds our invoice was ready to print on our screen, with a clear breakdown of each activity that customers should find easy to understand and verify.

You can also do your billing using QuickBooks. In fact, Work Theory can export information such as customers references and billable items in a QuickBooks-compatible format, which makes for an inexpensive integration with your accounting system if you use a compatible application.

We found that Work Theory offers only basic project control features that lack, for instance, task dependency from another task. However, its simplicity, moderate cost, and easy invoicing make for an interesting combination that you should consider for your company.