We have released our new scheduling add-on to everyone. You can now create a schedule for specific times, events or shifts. Users, Admins or Managers can be enabled to receive reminders (via text, email or twitter) about clocking in/out of a scheduled event.
This add-on has a lot of great features that you should try out! Check out our wiki for a detailed guide on how to use the scheduling add-on and/or you can watch it in action through this video link.
For the past couple of months we’ve been hard at work on many different projects, one of the highlights is our new scheduling add-on. This add-on allows you to schedule users for an event and enable them (and/or managers and admins) to receive reminders to clock in/out for the scheduled event.
Please note: This add-on is still in beta and is still under development. Please be patient and submit all bugs/feedback to support@tsheets.com.
Ready to get started with scheduling on your TSheets account? Give us a ring at 888-836-2720 or send us an email at support@tsheets.com and ask for the ‘Scheduling Add-On’.
Today we have another exciting announcement – TSheets has leveraged the TwitterAPI to create a link between our services. TSheets users with Twitter accounts can now send direct messages to @tsheets to start or stop the clock, switch job codes, or add notes to their work-log.
One of the unexpected benefits we quickly discovered is if you’re outside the US and want to send text messages to track your time, you can now do it! Twitter has phone numbers that allow almost anyone in any country to send a text message to @tsheets via twitter. Tracking your time from your cell just got easier :)
Learn More
Check out our Twitter integration page where you can see examples, screenshots, and more. If you don’t already have a TSheets account now’s the time. Enter coupon code “TS0420″ when signing up and get $20 credit instantly applied to your paid account. (offer expires May 1st 2009)
So you want to be a TSheets Beta Tester? We are looking for current or new TSheets clients that are BlackBerry and/or AT&T mobile users with a phone that is not more than two years old. Inquiries will need to be sent to Jen Harris <jenharris@tsheeets.com> with the make and model of your phone, and your top three favorite foods. If we like your favorite foods (and your phone will work for our beta testing) we’ll email you instructions for the download and information on how to give us feedback.
Thanks so much for participating…great products are a result of consumer interaction, especially when a company listens & takes note.
Quick Overview
What is TSheets wanting me to Beta test?
Our J2ME time tracking application can be downloaded onto your phone so you can track time on the go, even if you are out of cell range. In the future we are even planning to track your GPS location on certain phones.
Can you give me the perks on the J2ME app?
1. It works when out of cell service.
2. It’s a download on your phone so it’s faster and nicer than the browser.
What services/phones does it work with?
Currently most Blackberrys or any relatively new AT&T phone. Unfortunately iPhone users are not eligible for this beta test, yet.
Why would a company/individual use it?
Convenience. When you want you or your employee’s time accurately tracked even when out of cell service range.
Who would be a perfect BETA customer? A company with a hand-full of mobile employees or even just an individual that has BlackBerry’s and/or AT&T phones (again except the iPhone)
OR
A freelancer who’s a little tech-savvy and wants to track their time while traveling.
How long is the Beta Test?
Beta will start this week and end when we feel it is ready, a few perfectionists on board here!
What will I have to do to report information to you?
Once we agree that you qualify for Beta testing, we will email you back with all the information, downloads & where you can go to give us feedback with your experience.
What is TSheets? TSheets provides tools and software to make time tracking easy for businesses and freelancers alike.
Get Started Now! Email Jen with the make & model of your phone…and your favorite food! From there we will invite you to the super secret site to get started!
These are relatively simple new items, but nonetheless, they are new & we wanted you to know about them!
Timesheet List Updates
When viewing the timesheet list, you can now sort the list in chronological or reverse chronological order by clicking on the “Time In” tab. We’ve also added the ability to sort the timesheet list by Time Out, Total Hours, First Name, Last Name, Job Code, and Location. Just click the approperiate tab and you’re on your way. The user search has been improved too. You can now search employee’s timesheets by either first name, last name or email in addition to user name.
To get this new update, click on “Manage Timesheets”, then click “List View” in the upper left hand corner. If you need to refresh your browser, you’ll see a baby blue notification pop up directing you to do so in order to enable the new feature.
Updated Report
Once again, our customers are helping shape the wow factor & usability of TSheets – keep the requests coming in!
The new PDF reports are easier to read for Internet Explorer users and the job codes are no longer abbreviated, you will now see the full job code name.
New People
It is very exciting to be hiring people when there are local companies shutting their doors and down sizing all over the place. Please welcome our newest additions to the team!
Bill Logsdon: Bill is a local boy with general manager experience in the cable TV industry that loves to connect with customers and thrives on creating relationships. He has an impeccable sales record that led him to one of the top positions in the Northwest. Bill is a dedicated father of two: Alyvia & Jaksen and loves to shoot hoops when ever the chance arises.
Rick York: Rick is a fresh faced graduate of Northwest Nazarene University with a degree in Business Administration. His unmistakable swagger with customers makes him likable and successful at solving problems at the same time. Rick is a sports nut to the core & loves to throw the ball around even in our parking lot on a snowy day.
Jen Harris: Jen landed at TSheets in November of 2008, geared up to make a difference in a company with a social media plan. With three years of educating, training & doing social media for local SMB’s, Jen understands the power of the internet when combined with evangelical customers and a great product. Jen has three kids: Five year old Ella & two year old twins Henry & Clara.
The old adage “The devil is in the details,” couldn’t be more true when referencing TSheets. Why is this? While others use a simple stopwatch approach (keeping track of duration only), TSheets uses a detailed timestamp for all clock-ins/outs and job code switches, something that appears simple on the surface, but that is actually quite complex under the hood.
Why Timestamp?
Aside from making development much more complex (think timezones and daylight savings), timestamps allow TSheets to track not only time, but to log a time line of when events actually transpired. For instance a typical day may involve working for a total duration of 8 hours, but what events took place during that time?
With TSheets, that may look something like this: Clock-in at 7:59a, switch job code at 10:12a, clock-out at 12:10p, clock-in at 1:30p…. you get the idea.
Why is this Good?
Timestamps create a virtual paper trail of when events took place, allowing for detailed reporting and auditing.
Without timestamps, your recorded time is like a sandwich with no meat.
The ability to send text messages to track your time has long been a staple in TSheets’ plethora of time keeping options. However, if you have long job/task names you run the risk of developing something akin to ‘CrackBerry Thumb‘ with all of the typing involved! I am extremely slow at typing text messages into my phone, so this latest feature comes with a huge sigh of relief.
Now you can assign aliases or ‘SMS Codes’ to your jobs/projects within TSheets. This allows you to retain your long, descriptive job/project names and have an extremely short and simple label for use with your text messages.
First, make sure you have the SMS add-on installed. Then, to assign SMS Codes to your jobs/projects, open up the Job Codes management window (in the left-hand menu in the main interface). Edit a job code, and you’ll see an additional field available now called ‘SMS Code’. You can type up to 10 letters or numbers in here, no spaces.
Key Point! If you are using a tiered job/project model (i.e. Clients -> Projects -> Tasks), the SMS Codes you assign at Level 1 automatically get prepended onto the codes at Level 2, and both are prepended on to those at Level 3, etc. See the following example.
Here I have a job code named ‘Animal Training’ at the top with an SMS Code of ‘at’, and then a child job code underneath that named Cheetah with an SMS Code of ‘c’, and finally another child underneath that named Running with an SMS code of ‘run’. You can see that the codes inherited from the parent job codes are reflected in the edit window for any given job code, so it makes it easy to see what you’ll end up with. So, for this example, the SMS Code I would use to clock in to the ‘Animal Training / Cheetah / Running’ job code would be ‘atcrun’.
Once you get all of your SMS Codes set up, wouldn’t it be nice to have a cheat sheet to refer to while trying to remember them all? We thought so too. You can access a printable SMS Code Cheat Sheet by Clicking on the ‘SMS Integration’ link in your account and clicking on a link in the resulting window. If you are an administrator who hasn’t set up their own phone for SMS within TSheets, you can access the printable Cheat Sheet by going to My Account -> Addons -> SMS -> Preferences, and clicking on a link from there.
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.
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. 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!
We are looking for current or new 
