See how we can integrate our products to provide tailor-made solutions

Sage TimeSheet, Sage Carpe Diem and Timeslips are all great products. In the majority of cases, our customers find that one of these products provides the solution that they require. Where your requirements are more broad ranging, we may well be able to provide a more tailored, better solution to your requirements using a combination of these products.

The following brief scenarios outline some of the circumstances where this might be relevant and also the appropriate solution. To find the best solution for your requirements, please call us. We pride ourselves on finding the best solution for individuals and will be pleased to help.

The activities against which we wish to track time include both job- or project-based activities and event-driven activities

Sage TimeSheet undoubtedly provides a great solution for recording time against job- or project-based activities. Sage Carpe Diem is ideal for tracking time against activities that are event driven, often short in duration and that can relate to any one of a large client or customer base and that are largely unplanned. See how both requirements can occur in the same and how both products can work together.

An example that illustrates how this can happen in a mid-sized could be a computer software company with 150 staff.

• 100 staff are project-based, either working on new software solutions or maintenance of existing products
• 25 staff are in sales and administration. Their time is tracked against a relatively small set of pre-defined of business activities
• 25 staff work in support. Their time is tracked by support contract and by activity. Support staff could be working on any one of 1,500 support contracts and could work on more than 50 different contracts in a day.

It is clear that TimeSheet provides the best solution for all the project-based and sales and administration staff. It is also clear that Sage Carpe Diem provides the best solution for the support staff. Even more importantly, when used together, they provide a totally integrated business solution with all source information and reporting held in the TimeSheet database.

Sage Carpe Diem's links to external tables draw the customer, support contract, activity and user information directly from TimeSheet, avoiding double entry and excessive administration and ensuring accuracy. Time is tracked and approved within Carpe and then imported into TimeSheet, a process that can be automated. And once in TimeSheet, the rate information held is applied to the time tracked.

So, now we have the most efficient means of data entry for the whole team and a consolidated database that provides the depth and breadth of management reporting required to run the business efficiently.

The business is job- or project-based, but we need to bill our clients for the work that we do

Clearly Sage TimeSheet is the right solution for recording the time against jobs or projects and to provide the management reporting required. It can also provide invoice backing sheets to accompany summary invoices produced in other systems and this has proved to be a very workable solution for many situations.

In some circumstances, more sophisticated billing is required. Perhaps, this could be provided by integrating TimeSheet with a job costing system. However, in many situations time is the key cost element and Timesheet provides all the cost management and reporting and work-in-progress analysis that is required.

In these circumstances, integrating Sage TimeSheet and Timeslips provides a very comprehensive and cost-effective solution that makes the most of TimeSheet's easy recording of project based time and fast and comprehensive management reporting as well as Timeslips broad-ranging and sophisticated billing options. This can also be a very scaleable solution. In larger organisations it is not uncommon to find a fee earner to bill preparer ratio of 50 to 1, providing potential scalability to over 1,000 fee earners.

The business is largely event-driven and be need to bill for our time, but we have over 50 fee earners

50 fee earners is really the limit of Timeslips scalability in terms of fee earners, but as a billing engine it can handle many more fee earners. In this scenario, integrating, say, a 100 user Sage Carpe Diem implementation with, say, a 10 user Timeslips implementation will provide a best of breed solution with the ultimate event-driven time tracking solution backed up by the most flexible, sophisticated cost-effective billing solution.