Time tracking blog

As the weather warms and days grow longer, everything seems to move more, even the pace of business. When you have mobile employees, keep track of them all with the TSheets mobile site for smartphones, featuring recent upgrades with custom fields and GPS stamping. Of course, TSheets is all about options for versatile timekeeping with elevated reporting—to keep you moving on up, no matter what.

Read the March edition of the newsletter.

Fall is the time to harvest the bounty of the year’s labor, and take stock of what you need for the future. Utilize this October to refine the TSheets app to work even better for your organization. Learn more about our technology in the new weekly TSheets Tips & Tricks webinar. Or let us add custom tracking fields to save you time.

Read the October edition of the newsletter.

Feedback. It’s what gives your business the ability to break-through it’s barriers. As a customer or as a team member, one of the most powerful tools we possess is the willingness to give and receive open and honest feedback. It’s how we evolve and move forward together.

Now, simply talking about this subject and actually doing it correctly in the midst of delicate office and personal politics are two very different things. Yes — giving feedback is scary and risky. Even receiving feedback is scary! It’s only when we face that fear that we move beyond it and become a better team for it.

So let’s do feedback right. Let’s practice. Answer me this: If you were CEO of TSheets for 1 day/month/year, what would you change as it relates to the software, features, strategy, marketing, etc…? Email matt@tsheets.com.

I’m sincere in getting your open and honest feedback, so I commit to personally responding to all comments (even it if takes a while due to quantity of responses).

A sense of humor, besides being a sought-after trait in online dating profiles, is also an essential ingredient to a tech business with tenacity and wit. I know, I know, “a sense of humor” probably sounds a little too simple to be an ingredient in the Secret Sauce, but it’s more important than you may think (kind of like salt, right?).

At TSheets, we can laugh at ourselves. That means our team is allowed to make mistakes, then find the lesson/hilarity in them. And whenever there is an environment that enables individuals to fail, learn, move forward and smile, then, and only then, confidence builds and individuals start taking risks. This has produced a culture where team members are passionate and excited about the challenges that they face every day.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, seems insurmountable to this team because they believe in themselves, they believe in each other, and they know how to laugh (especially, at me).

It’s fall. The beautiful Idaho mountain leaves are changing and so are our features! There are now more ways to track, manage and gain control over time. This September, we’re introducing our new dial-in add on, a beta CREW app for Android, and ingredient #4 in our secret sauce.

Read the September edition of our newsletter.

Make the final days of summer count with time tracking that improves the look, feel and even taste of doing business. This month, we unveil our updated iPhone and Android apps, the completely redesigned TSheets.com, ingredient #3 in our secret sauce, and a new integration with the payroll system Paychex.

Read the August edition of our newsletter.

A base ingredient to a brilliant tech business? Brilliant software engineers. We didn’t hire “C” players and expect “A” work. We hired “A+” players that have architected and built some of the largest systems for the largest companies in the world, and we expect “A+” world-class deliverables.

The back-end of TSheets is ridiculously complicated, so that the front-end can be crazy simple. It’s unusual to see a calloused-thumbed, technophobe of a construction worker and a white-collar executive in a Fortune 500 firm use the same app in different ways, but with equal effectiveness. Legions of quick-off time tracking companies out there have chosen the programming and strategic path of least resistance, leading to sub-par end results. In contrast, TSheets operates with a 20+-year plan, so we treat our customers and our employees with that level of commitment.

We treat these developers like the brilliant professionals that they are. We have NEVER had one of our developers leave us, and don’t plan on that happening in the near future. I was recently asked in an interview, “Why would someone want to work for TSheets?” My answer, “Because it will probably be their last job.”

Can you articulate your secret sauce and its ingredients?

Lately, I have been consumed with thoughts about what’s in the TSheets “secret sauce” (SS). Since this is the sixth company that I have built, I know how important it is to have, know, and be able to communicate your SS to your customers, friends, waiters, and the rest of the world. Admittedly though, uncovering and understanding the ingredients to our SS at TSheets has only come as a result of spending tremendous amount of time “slaving over the hot stove” so to speak.

I’ll be sharing the ingredients with you over the next few months, but I’d like to share one first.

Ingredient One
Customized by and for our Customers. From the first inklings of TSheets’ inception, our company came to bear because of a customer saying, “I want it work like this…”
Every feature we’ve built originated from a request from a real, living, paying, breathing customer. Now our features are too long to list here.

So here’s the real added something-something that sets TSheets apart. Our features, however customized and lengthy, are built from a base of practicality. They are not the hazy late-night dream of a geek developer in the backroom hyped up on RedBull, wanting to develop a reputation for coolness and test coding skills. Our features reflect the real world of business. And many, many different ways of doing business.

But how does this get translated into our Secret Sauce? (I’m glad you asked.) When our prospects take the time to actually try our software and use the features that have been built for and by our customers, they see the business benefits immediately, and even get a little mad at themselves for not having found us years before. They actually take the time (on their own!) to send us “Thank You” letters just for creating an app that is designed for real live business use.

You may be thinking to yourself, because I know that I did, how could someone get so excited over a “time tracking” application? Just wait until you hear the next ingredient in the Secret Sauce…

To be continued…

TSheets is springing forward with new technology developments to keep time on track in the business world. Stay tuned in on all the latest insight and time tracking innovations below—and remember stay posted at our blog and Facebook fan page for extra, timely updates.

Did you know we have a dedicated support area on our site? Visit help.tsheets.com to check it out.

Click here to read the full Newsletter…

I grabbed the following quote from Jason Freid’s blog at 37 Signals:

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”—Albert Einstein

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Breakthrough technology in today’s world requires a genius of simplicity. People expect the applications and devices they use to intuitively and seamlessly move their lives forward, without creating obstacles or headaches. The best technology breaks down barriers and mental blocks. It solves problems. It connects people with tools and other people.  It offers an ideal form that showcases the clean beauty of its function.

For 5 years, with our courage in force, TSheets has forged ahead in the direction of intuitive, integrated, simple and genius time-tracking technology. We now have (this is a biased opinion, I grant you), one of the best time tracking apps in the market for our targeted prospects: Companies that employ 1 to 10,000 in a service-related industry and typically (but not always) have mobile employees and/or multiple locations.

The TSheets crew has been building and adding and building and adding features for 5 years now. We still have a few more features debuting in the next few months (like the Crew addition to our mobile app); however, the major thrust of our development team is going to be focused on polish, workflow and speed.

Day in and day out, our app beats the competition in price and capabilities, but only when we get the opportunity to show them individually. It’s time to make it easier for our customers to fall in love with TSheets.