Turning Apple iCal into Dollars

Time tracking and budget monitoring "for the rest of us." Seamlessly convert your iCal appointment schedule to dollars and cents, monitor your project budgets, and print time sheets with Small Town Software's new Time and Budgets application.

(PRWEB) July 20, 2004 -- Design professionals, lawyers, consultants--any Mac user who bills clients for their time--will enjoy the way Small Town Software's new Time and Budgets application enables them to use Apple iCal as a time and billing tool.

"Time and budgets, not time and billing" Small Town's C. Scott Gilbert is quick to say. "We focus on innovative ways to collect time and analyze what you work on, and leave the billing to established billing applications." And he's right: Time and Budgets tracks time, monitors your project budget, and creates reports-but leaves the actual billing to applications like Inuit's QuickBooks, which it integrates with via a data export.

Time and Budgets real strength lies in how it collects time data from industry standard WebDAV data sources, and then converts that data into useful information. Fans of Apple's free calendar program titled iCal can seamlessly convert their appointment schedule to dollars and cents. Any calendar program that supports the WebDAV format (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) will work with Time and Budgets, though for seamless data input a WebDAV server is required (enter Apple's .Mac program).

A hidden feature many will applaud is the capability for a firm's clients to login and view progress on their individual projects. Jeff Pulcini, President of Pittsburgh-based Cross IT Services and a Time and Budgets user adds "Whether it's a one-time project or ongoing support, I find that tracking activities and costs and then effectively communicating this to my clients is vital. Time and Budgets keeps my clients on top of the work, and the costs." This feature allows the client to play an integral role helping to eliminate nasty budget surprises or unexpected invoices.

Time and Budgets does support logging time to individual projects, project phases and individual tasks, but this requires entering simple tags into the notes field of your calendar application to do so. However, if you do not choose to track your time by project, or wish to track all of your time to a single project, the use of tags is not necessary.

Some of the reports available in Time and Budgets include time sheets with visual time charts, project reports including details about time logged to individual phases and tasks, and aggregate workgroup reports. These workgroup reports enable a business owner, team leader or project manager to keep tabs on accumulated time for multiple people.

Time and Budgets allows you to create multiple budgets for each project, combine selected budgets, and use them to generate email-based alerts when a project has reached a financial goal-such as "when 50% of the budget has been consumed." The ability to send these alerts to mobile devices is planned for an upcoming release.

This product is web-based, sports a clean and attractive user-interface, and supports 128-bit encryption to keep your data secure.

Two versions of Time and Budgets are available:

- a no-hassle low-cost "hosted" version (your data hosted at timeandbudgets.com) is available for $15 per user (volume discounts apply)

- a server-based version (for your company's private intranet) is available for $4,900

More information can be found online at www.timeandbudgets.com

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