BigTime

BigTime is the program we use for tracking time, managing expenses, and sending out invoices. Using QuickBooks as our primary accounting software has its advantages, and one of those is that BigTime can sync up with QuickBooks during the day to make sure that the two are always up to date.

The approval screen does not currently allow for invoices to be filtered by Team Lead, so all Team Leads have access to all invoices rather than just their own. It's not easy to modify your own report, therefore we typically have to contact support for assistance.

It's a piece of software that performs exactly what it's supposed to and does it well. The process of implementation was quite fair, and the accompanying customer service was excellent. Time tracking and the ability to divide it into other sections if necessary. For numerous projects, I've taken use of the platform's ability to develop custom reports, which have been useful.

BigTime doesn't always communicate to itself, so you have to dig a little further to find the answer you're looking for. In addition, I've used BigTime's "help" option and spoken with a live person who was able to diagnose my difficulties immediately away.

Overall, we have been very happy with BigTime and its use in support of our field consultants. Our production implementation went smoothly and their staff provided helpful training and support to assist us with our launch. In addition, we have been very pleased with the configurability of the platform - just about every time we wanted to do something a certain way, for example how we wanted to display the form for our field's timesheet data entry, there was a way to configure the system to our liking.

Also, we have been very impressed with the speed of the system and the design of the user interface. It's very responsive, easy to use, and everything is laid out intuitively. Also, the Reporting module is very comprehensive and it provides a way to pull data just about any which way one could want. BigTime has also been responsive and helpful in helping to support us when certain custom reports were required and we needed some guidance.

Special thanks to both CSRs for their support with our implementation.

We have no outstanding support tickets currently and we have only seen a few small glitches but once we bring them to the vendors attention there is usually a way to correct it or some type of acceptable workaround. As far as suggested areas we think they can improve upon, one would be having the ability to set up to send specific invoices to multiple customer contacts on the To: line. Another area for improvement is sometimes the bill rate isn’t pulled into the invoicing module consistently so we have to re-enter all the rates in that particular project code.

As far as platform enhancements to make BigTime even better, we have suggested the ability to enhance the Allocations module so a manager can forecast a resource across multiple projects within the same or multiple accounts from the same screen/grid. Today this must be done via clicking into each project in the Project List section which is time consuming and a little clunky. This would be huge for us since we have a number of consultants who work on multiple projects across a given week/month/etc. Another enhancement would be to provide easy-to-pull reports that show a consultants profitability (revenue generated minus cost) across a given date range. This is not currently doable with the platform, but all the data is there since the system maintains both bill rate and cost-level information. We are hoping these items make their way onto the product roadmap here in the relative near future.