Time tracking blog

Due to overwhelming request, we’re pleased to announce our own, in-house invoicing. We’ve had invoicing now for quite some time with our FreshBooks integration (an awesome invoicing solution), but now offer a simple in-house solution. While it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles FreshBooks has, it is a very fast and quick way to invoice if you don’t already have a FreshBooks account. Use FreshBooks for invoicing, or use TSheets for invoicing, or use them both together. The choice is yours.

The invoicing works the same, except now you can optionally send the information to FreshBooks and generate a printable PDF of your invoice.

It’s simple to get started:

1. Log in to your TSheets account (as an admin)
2. Under My Account/Add Ons, install the Invoicing Add on
3. You’ll now have the ability to assign billable rates to your job codes (done through the “Manage Job-Codes” feature)
   
4. To generate an invoice, click the “Invoicing” menu item
5. A new window will appear allowing you to customize the invoice criteria
6. Once you have generated a preview of your invoice, you can finalize this invoice and generate a printable PDF by clicking the “Finalize Invoice and Generate PDF” button.  This will mark time contained within the invoice as “Invoiced” and will lock these records from editing (don’t worry, you can always unlock them if you need to), and will also provide you with a link to retreive the PDF version of your invoice.

Our built-in invoicing feature should make it easy (and quick) to turn your hours tracked with TSheets into money earned.

This is just downright awesome, you heard it, right? TSheets now offers invoicing! We have a fully integrated solution with our newest partner – FreshBooks . Now that’s what we call getting things done!

FreshBooks is an exceptional invoicing software solution aimed primarily at freelance professionals. They’re built on the premise that billing is a pain, and shouldn’t be. They realize you’ve tried other archaic methods and they developed something simple, affordable, and easy to use. Does this philosophy sound familiar? If so, you’ve been reading the “TSheets Story”…

A quick view of our CEO, Matt Rissell’s inbox reveals that TSheets customers have been overwhelmingly requesting invoicing capabilities. TSheets customers have the ability to clock in and out real time through any computer, text message, iPhone, Android and even a phone call! Now, when you add invoicing, it’s like business productivity meets euphoria. Remember, TSheets allows you to track specific job codes, projects, and sub-projects with an actual time stamp and not just simply ‘hours worked’ or elapsed time like a stop watch. A seemingly simple act, but when you’re an employer, you need to know if the employee was at the job at 8:03am vs. just working for 6 hours on a particular day

Brandon Zehm, our CTO, is passionate about the technology involved on the backend of the process because while it’s complicated on the backend the front end is “5th Grade Simple”.

“With over 100 hours of development time, the TSheets / FreshBooks integration wasn’t a small feat. We leveraged the API that FreshBooks provides to both pull information from and send invoice data to FreshBooks. The most challenging aspect of this integration was adding the ability to “lock” timesheets to ensure data integrity is maintained.”

To our valued TSheets customers – you asked, we listened, and together with FreshBooks, we’re delivering. Starting today our Freelancer, Business, and Platinum accounts will now feature the full power of FreshBooks invoicing features for pain free invoicing of any number of clients.

View our screencast below to see our FreshBooks invoicing integration in action:

We see the FreshBooks integration as a way to further our commitment to our customers:
TSheets Philosophy: Make the life of the small business owner simpler, easier, and more productive.
The TSheets Audacious Goal: Empower the world’s business owners.

Thanks to our friends over at onlineaccounting.com, we received a huge education on ways to improve our QuickBooks export format.  In other words, we just got schooled by the women who wrote the book on using QuickBooks properly.  If you use QuickBooks for processing payroll or want to easily create invoices from your time tracking data, you are going to love this!

Our QuickBooks integration has been rewritten as an Add-on, and can now be found in the Add-ons section of your Freelancer, Business, or Platinum TSheets account.  To get started, open the My Account window from the main TSheets interface, and click on the Add-ons tab.  Scroll down and locate the QuickBooks Add-on, and click on Install.  Upon doing this, another window will open up where you’ll be presented with an array of configuration options.

Some of the items you’ll get a chance to configure as part of the Add-on are:

• Company Create Time – This is a unique code related to your installation of QuickBooks, and is required in order to import time into it.
• Payroll Items – TSheets now allows you to enter your QuickBooks Payroll Items into TSheets, and map a default one to each of your employees!  This is going to make processing payroll much more like a checkup as opposed to a root canal.
• Customer / Job / Task Mapping – Yes, you can have your TSheets time mapped directly to your Customers, Jobs, and Tasks in QuickBooks.  It’s just a matter of naming your job/project codes so they match your QuickBooks entries.
• Billable Job Codes – That’s right, you can now mark a job/project code as billable or not.  If you export time that was tracked against a billable job code, it will set the billable flag so that it can be an invoice item once it’s imported into QuickBooks.
• Define Payroll Schedule – You can define your payroll schedule (weekly, biweekly, twice a month, monthly) so that you don’t have to do manual calculations when pulling reports.  Just select the pay period with the correct period end date and you’re ready to go.

Here are a few images so you can get a feel for how easy this is.  Check it out yourself via a free trial account, we think you’ll be pleased!

Company Create Time

Payroll Items

Billable Job Codes

Payroll Schedule