Time tracking blog

Matt Rissell joins Twitter, Ebay, Typepad, MLB, Trism, Modality and Enigma and Cro-Mag Rally to show off their cool new apps and talk about the release of the new Apple App store.

TSheets’ First Customer

Matt Rissell was frustrated. With 3 locations and about 20 employees, time and attendance tracking was becoming a bigger head-ache every day. His employees were using traditional paper timesheets. “It came to the point where my bookkeeper and I were dreading payroll prep”, says Rissell. “The whole process was distracting me from working on the business”. In addition to issues like consolidation, poor handwriting, and missing paperwork, Rissell knew there was a bigger problem. “I knew people were fudging on their timesheets” says Rissell. “And I knew it was costing me. Not just the dollars, but the productivity”. To Rissell, it just came to common sense and control. “I learned a long time ago, if you don’t control the little things, they can kill you. It can be compared to person being mortally wounded from a 1000 paper cuts ”, he says.

As the owner of a printer supply company and a background in business mobile devices, Rissell knew about business technology. He knew that almost every business issue had a technology solution: inventory control, bookkeeping, e-mail, order processing, etc. So Matt set out to find some technology to solve this particular business problem. In his search for a time and attendance solution, Rissell was disappointed to find a lot of expensive options with a lot of features he didn’t need. “I found a lot of software solutions, but they were just way too expensive”, Rissell says. “I also didn’t want to use the traditional punch-card system” he says. “It was too expensive and didn’t solve all of my issues”.

Matt then turned to an old friend, Brandon Zehm. Zehm was a rock star in the programming world, with a client list that included the Department of Energy and Merrill Lynch. Matt explained his problem and asked Brandon if this was something he could create a custom application for. With a “no problem” response, Zehm built a simple application that allowed Rissell and his employees to clock-in and out from any PC. “I realized that there were two major problems with existing time-tracking software”, said Zehm. “Most required you to download software”, which he saw leading to problems for support and consistency. “An ASP model means that everyone is always on the same version”, says Zehm. The second issue was the actual clock-in/out function. “This was the key”, he said. “It had to be super simple to use”. After several months of programming and testing, Brandon had a time and attendance package ready for Matt to use in his business.

“The results were almost immediate” said Rissell. The biggest impact was on accurately paying for time worked. By accurately capturing clock-ins and clock-outs it saved the company about ½ hour per day per employee. For a $10/hour employee, this added up to $5/day. “The math was obvious”, said Rissell. There were other benefits to accurately logging time. “My employees knew that their time was being tracked” so they began to be more punctual. This also increased productivity – a number that was hard to calculate but that was immediately felt. “-simply put, the team got more accomplished” said Rissell.

Not long afterward, Rissell sold his business. When looking at other business opportunities, he went back to the application that Zehm had created. “My bookkeeper suggested it first” said Rissell. Knowing the impact it had on his business, Rissell was intrigued. “It had everything I wanted in a business opportunity. It was web-based, simple, and truly helped small business owners”. For Rissell, starting a new company was a matter of principle. “I just felt like making small business owners more profitable was something I had to do.”

In April of 2007, Rissell and Zehm launched TSheets. “The original clock-in/out feature is pretty much the same as the custom app I created”, said Zehm. From that point, many additional features were added such as reporting, job codes, Quickbooks interface, and mobile access. “It was critical that we kept the original simplicity” says Rissell. “I didn’t want TSheets to turn into something that I wouldn’t have used”. As customers were added, so were features. “the new features we have added in the past year have been the direct result of customer requests”, say Zehm. This was in keeping with Zehm’s development philosophy of being customer-driven, not feature-driven. “A lot of products have features just because the developer can make them” says Zehm. “We felt that it was critical to keep TSheets very clean and usable”. Pricing was another critical area. “We used a simple formula – what would I have paid for it”, says Rissell. This lead to a scalable pricing model based on the number of employees a company has using TSheets. “This puts our starting price at $9.95/month with no set up fee or contracts”, say Rissell. “That makes TSheets accessible to pretty much anyone!”

Rissell and Zehm were pleased to discover that TSheets’ customers were having the same return-on-investment results as Rissell originally had. “We had one customer tell us that TSheets saved them about $2500 in a single week” said Rissell. This reflected the trend over the past fifteen years of small business becoming more efficient and profitable through technology. “That was a big reason for selecting the ASP model”, said Rissell. By using a subscriber revenue model, the costs of development were split over 1000s of customers,

The Future

In January of 2008, TSheets began an effort to go global. Armed with a strong management and investor team, TSheets began investing in marketing, staffing, and infrastructure. A big part of this effort was to partner with like-minded companies. “They had to empower small business owners, be web-based, and be affordable”, said Rissell. This lead to partnerships with companies like Yugma, a web conferencing application. In addition, dozens of features were fast-tracked for release. “It was just time to take this to the next level” said Rissell. “I was confident that we had a provable business model – and we knew our initial customers loved the product”.

In April of 2008, TSheets announced “Timeclock 2.0”, an initiative to create a standard for developing time keeping software for small business owners. At the same time, TSheets also released a free single user version, an upgrade to their time sheet editor called “Time Slider”, and improvements with Paid Time Off (PTO) tracking and reporting.

Slated for release later in ’08 is a mobile device widget, multiple languages version, an API for the developer community to add TSheets functionality to other applications. Rissell’s enthusiasm is obvious. “I have been telling everyone that this is big. Now the proof is in the pudding!”

For more information, visit TSheets’ media page here.

About TSheets

TSheets (www.tsheets.com) is an online time and attendance program that turns any PC or mobile device into a time clock. Currently, TSheets’ customers have over 3000 employees using TSheets. Founded in 2006, TSheets is based in Boise, ID and currently has a staff of nine. For more information, please contact Justin Foster at Tricycle Consulting –justin@thetricycle.com or 208-841-3497.

Boise, Idaho – April 1, 2008 – Today, TSheets.com (www.tsheets.com) announced the launch of a new standard for web-based timekeeping called “Timeclock 2.0″. This standard was developed to create a benchmark for emulating the simple clock-in/out functionality of traditional time clocks, while still providing a web-based application. “We created this standard because most of the time keeping software is just too expensive and not practical for small business owners”, says Matt Rissell, CEO of TSheets. The standard focuses on the most critical point of time tracking, clocking in and clocking out. “If you can’t make it easy to clock in and out, business owners will just revert to paper timesheets”, says Rissell. Other elements of the standard include mobile clocking in/out, managing multiple locations, and payroll reporting.

Founded in 2006, TSheets is part of a growing web segment called “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) that uses a subscription-based business model to spread the costs of software over thousands of users, making it affordable for small business owners to use modern technology. Examples include Google’s Gmail, Salesforce.com, Yugma.com and dozens of other web-based business tools. Part of the popularity of SaaS applications is that they typically have a low monthly fee based on the number of users, with support and upgrades often included in the subscription fee. “Timeclock 2.0 is really made possible by the SaaS business model” says Rissell.

A typical small business owner still uses paper time sheets or analog punch clocks for managing employee time. Most PC based time keeping applications are bundled with expensive HR or payroll packages. Other web-based software is available, but cater primarily to single-users such as freelancers or contractors. TSheets’ customers are small business owners with 5 to 20 employees. “Our focus is the small business owner and his or her employees” says Rissell. Thus, the focus on emulating an environment that a small business owner is most used to. The key to making it easier to use for small business owners was simplicity. “We are constantly reminding ourselves who our core audience is” says Rissell.

Rissell has plenty of first-hand experience with the issues of time-keeping. As the owner of a chain of printing supply stores, Rissell experienced first-hand the frustrations of dealing with time sheets, payroll preparation, and consolidating multiple locations. “I just thought this was part of running a business”, says Rissell. What bothered him the most was the actual process of tracking time. “I knew that the numbers weren’t accurate, and it was driving me crazy” says Rissell. Most of this was not dishonest employees, but just the inherent nature of using paper time tracking methods. After not being able to find an application that would work for his business, Rissell contracted with a top developer named Brandon Zehm to build a web-based application. After using the application for a month, the results were obvious. “We figured we saved about $2000 in the first month” says Rissell. Not long after, Rissell sold his business and partnered with Zehm to start TSheets. “After my last company having the headache of over 30 employees and four locations, I was passionate about my next business being web based” said Rissell.

Since then, they have focused on keeping that original simplicity while still adding robustness and functionality. In addition to the announcement of the Timeclock 2.0 initiative, TSheets also announced the release of several new features of their web-based time tracking software, including the release of a free single-user version. One of the most unique new features is a time sheet editor that uses Rich Internet technology to allow managers to edit time sheets through a graphical interface called a “Time Slider”. Additional enhancements in this version include Paid Time Off (PTO) tracking, Quickbooks integration, and additional reporting functionality.

To learn more, visit TSheet’s media page at http://media.tsheets.com

About TSheets

TSheets (www.tsheets.com) is a web-based time and attendance program that allows you and your employees to clock in and out from a computer or cell phone. Currently, TSheets’ customers have several thousand employees using TSheets throughout the world and is multiplying daily. Founded in 2006, TSheets is based in Meridian, ID and currently has a staff of nine. For more information, please contact Justin Foster at Tricycle Consulting –justin@thetricycle.com or 208-841-3497.

I received an email from my CTO, one of 50 daily emails, that was a forward about a Web 2.0 company that had some advertising opportunities. While this isn’t an email that I would normally pay too much attention to, this one happened to be about a company that offered a service that I was currently looking for – Webinars. I was on an intense hunt to find a webinar service that would meet our needs and had a simple but very capable interface for our customers. As you can guess, it was an email introducing Yugma. Thus, I checked out their website and quickly became a customer.

After using Yugma’s service several times and having some interaction with their company I began to ‘catch’ and understand their corporate culture and the more I learned, the more parallels that I found between TSheets and Yugma. This spurred me to pursue a discussion with their Executive Team to entertain the idea of creating a strategic relationship between the two companies. Not long after my initial discussions with their Director of Global Sales, the partnership began to take shape.

Even though we are still in our initial phases of introducing our relationship to the market we have had tremendous feedback. So far, we have had nothing but positive responses from those that have tried Yugma and they have actually gone as far as thanking us for introducing them to their newest Web 2.0 tool that they are implementing in their businesses.

If you have any other business tools that you believe would be a great fit with TSheets, please email me at matt@tsheets.com.

Matt Rissell shares the story about how TSheets, the online timesheet and time tracking service, began. In this short video Matt also shares what TSheets can do for small and medium sized companies.