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.

Which looks right to you?

29/10/2008 or 10/29/2008

Determining whether the month or the day should come first in a date is not very difficult to do. If you live in the U.S., the month comes first - if you live pretty much anywhere else, the day comes first. As with other things like feet and meters, here in the U.S. we seem to do things a little bit ‘differently’. With customers of TSheets ranging the whole world over, we’ve had numerous requests from clients for the ability to display dates in the ‘right’ format.

Now you can do so. If you’d like to see your dates with the day first rather than the month, open up My Account from the main interface, then go to Advanced -> Time Format. There, you’ll see a choice between a middle endian date format (MM/DD/YYYY) and a little endian date format (DD/MM/YYYY). Save the changes and you’ll see the new date format reflected throughout TSheets.

Curious to see who else in the world treats a date like the U.S.? Check out the list here.

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

Wondering what your co-workers are working on? We’ve just released some updates to the Who’s Working list that make it possible for you to see. Previously, we displayed the employee’s shift total. Now from the main TSheets web interface you can see what job/project someone is clocked in under, how long they’ve been clocked in for that job/project, and you can also see the total number of hours clocked for the entire day.

If someone is clocked in under a long job/project name, you’ll only see a portion of it in the Who’s Working list. However, you can see the full job/project name by hovering your mouse over the job/project and the full name will appear as a popup.

For employees who are currently off the clock, you’ll still be able to see the total number of hours they’ve clocked for the day.

Now you’ll know when the Sales team is talking up your latest gadgets and gizmos and the Development team is squashing those elusive software bugs :)

The Who’s Working List is displayed to admins by default, but you can allow any/all employees to view it by granting the ‘See “Who’s Working”‘ permission via the employee editor. You can further customize it to hide hours worked from employees via your My Account window -> Advanced tab. This will allow them to see who is working and on what job/project, but there will be no information displayed concerning how long they’ve been working for that day or shift.

Enjoy!

Today we have the pleasure of announcing another highly anticipated feature - Multi-level Job/Project codes!  TSheets users with the new business or freelancer accounts finally have the option of breaking away from a flat list of job codes, and can now track time against clients, projects, and tasks.

How does it work? Essentially multi-level job-codes work just the way they did before, except now there’s a parent / child relationship that can be created.  Use this structure to your advantage by breaking jobs/projects into levels.  Client -> Project -> Task is probably the most common way to break tasks out, but we’ve left it open ended so it will work for your unique needs.  Get started by clicking “Manage Employees” (yes, we know this is counter-intuitive) and then “Manage Jobs/Projects” at the bottom of the window.

We’ve added two new ways to make assigning job codes to employees easier.  Truly global job codes. For a long time we’ve had the ability to assign newly created job codes to “all current employees”.  We’ve now replaced that with an “Assign to everyone” check-box that makes that job-code globally assigned to everyone.  When job-codes are assigned to everyone they show up with a light-blue background color.  It’s important to realize that a job-code assigned to everyone with this option cannot be unassigned from anyone- it’s global.  Which leads us to the second improvement.

A new job-code assignment tool has been added.  To access it, create a job-code, then edit it again by clicking on the job-code’s name, and then click the new “Assign” button.  A new interface appears with a list of employees, allowing you to assign (or unassign) the job-code in bulk.  The screen-shot on the right shows it in action.

Moving forward. At some point we’re planning on adding a layer specifically for those of you tracking time for customer billing purposes.  We’re not sure what that will look like just yet, but it’s on our minds and might be ready in the 2-3 month range.  If you have suggestions be sure to post them, we take customer feedback very seriously.

More time tracker screen-shots:

Adding a new job-code:

Editing a job-code:

Moving a job-code:

Assigning job-codes to an employee:

Many of you have requested an export to .pdf feature. You spoke, we listened. An export to .pdf feature is now included in your TSheets reporting options. The main benefit is portability and ease of use. By exporting to a .pdf, you can now easily attach this timesheet to an email, file it in your personal files, compile weekly timesheets in one easy to read document, etc. By compiling a number of timesheets in one PDF, it’s now easy to create a (non) paper audit trail.

As a self employed professional, it will now be much easier to run a report, export to .pdf and send off to a client in an easy to read familiar format, explaining hours worked on project XYZ, an over/under estimate of project ABC, etc.

We’re also updating the already existing .csv export option. The current .csv report does not export as pure raw data, but rather includes a number of calculations already done for you. Many of you expressed interest in a ‘raw’ format that could easily be imported into a number of data integration systems such as payroll and/or HR databases.

Again, you spoke, we listened. Since you now have the option to export raw data, you and your IT department are free to do whatever you so choose with this data. Whether it be a pre-existing database you’re using, or building a custom database, TSheets can now provide you with raw time data.

From day one, we’ve always made it easy for our customers to track their time via extremely simple clock-in and clock-out functionality.  This is great for customers who want to track their time down to the second.  However, we’ve had great call from our customers for an easy way to enter their time manually.  This request often comes from those with salaried employees or consultants who have a block of time they need to track against a client.  We’ve heard your call and are responding with our latest feature, the ‘Weekly Time card’.

The Weekly Time card is an easy to use time ledger that allows you to easily and quickly populate your timesheet with multiple job/project codes and enter time in a spreadsheet-like format against those codes.  Daily and Weekly totals are calculated dynamically as you enter your data and are highlighted in a different color when they exceed configurable thresholds.  All data entered is stored on our redundant, backed-up infrastructure, of course - so you don’t have to worry about losing a thing.

It’s very easy to navigate around the timecard view - you can use your arrow keys to navigate to any cell on the sheet.  When you get to the bottom of your list, new rows are added dynamically as needed.  Whatever row and cell you are currently editing will be highlighted in a different color, so it’s easy to confirm which date/code you’re editing.

You have a Notes field which will show the notes you’ve entered for whichever cell you have highlighted in the grid.  You can edit the notes for any cell in the grid.

You can enable time tracking via the Weekly Time card for all employees, or individually for select employees only.

The Weekly Time card is one more way that TSheets customers can enter/view their time.  The list is really growing, here are some other ways that you can track time with TSheets:
> TSheets Touch
> Mobile Web App
> TGadget
> Mac Widget
> Jott Integration
> Web Interface

We’re proud to announce our brand new, iPhone optimized web app,  TSheets Touch.

TSheets Touch presents a new, graphical way of looking at and interacting with traditional time tracking methods.  

Starting, stopping and switching tasks is literally a touch (or click) away, saving time and making time tracking a little less arduous.

Read more about TSheets Touch at TechCrunch or at our TSheets Touch feature page.

Getting Started with TSheets Touch

Current TSheets users can visit their TSheets URL using their iPhone to use TSheets Touch.  

New users can visit http://app.tsheets.com/ip, where they can create an account and start tracking their time in minutes.

For mobile users without an iPhone, we’ve got you covered too with our mobile web app and Jott integration.

We’ve had mobile entry capabilities for a while now, making it easy to track time from any cell phone or PDA with Internet access.  Well hold on to your holsters because we’ve just made mobile time tracking even better!

Enter Notes

You can now use your mobile device to enter notes into your timesheets.  Enter your notes into the Notes text box, and then click on Save Notes.

View a Summary of Today’s Job Codes

Follow the ‘Today’s Job Codes’ link to get a breakdown of how much time you’ve spent on each of your job codes.  This is great for those wanting to keep on top of how they’re spending their time.

Switch Job Codes

Up until now you’ve had to clock out and then clock back in if you wanted to change to a different job code.  Now you can follow the ‘Switch’ link and do it all in one step.

The CEO of TSheets, a web based time tracking software, Matt Rissell talks with the Oprah Winfrey of the internet, Liz Strauss, about closing the gap between the online and offline business worlds. In her post entitled Part 1: A Timely Interview with Matt Rissell of TSheets, she asks Matt about what makes him tick and the theory of “Time”. Liz closes this post with a cliff hanger…. Check out the post, give it a read, and engage in the conversation!