Our Work:
Reliant feels that its work history speaks for itself. Below is a partial list of our recent development efforts.
Projects:
NetEffect
NetEffect is a growing IT and networking consulting company. They currently have 6 consultants who spend the majority of their day working at various client sites. While on site, they perform tasks that vary from routine maintenance to emergency rebuilds of servers. Their staff spends very little time in their home office and they needed a solution that would allow them to:
- Record time spent working for a client for billing purposes. If NetEffect's contract with the client has miniumum billable hours for an on site visit, then the time recorded must take that into account. For example, if the consultant spends fifteen minutes at the client site but NetEffect’s contract specifies that they will charge a minimum of half an hour each time that they must travel to the client site, the system must record that the time to be charged to the client is half an hour.
- Record what has been done at each client site and by whom. Clients are often serviced by whichever consultant is in their area. In order to make efficient use of their time, they must be able to easily see all work that has been done for the client and which NetEffect consultant performed each task.
- Track project hours. In addition to doing support and maintenance work, NetEffect will often be retained to upgrade client infrastructure in an contract scoped for just that project. The hours spent by NetEffect staff on such a project must be tracked separately from other work done for the client. In many cases, project work will even be at a different hourly rate than support work for the same customer.
- A Reporting system which will allow NetEffect to get a good grip on its costs and how efficiently it is using its staff’s time. For example, NetEffect doesn’t bill for time driving to a client site. This makes drive time an opportunity cost which they wanted to minimize. They needed to see how much time each tech was spending each day driving and realistically look at how profitable distant clients were in comparison to clients who required very short travel times.
- NetEffect uses Quickbooks to invoice its clients and write checks to its consultants. Any system which tracks worker hours and calculates billable amounts to customers must be able to export this data to Quickbooks.
In approximately 6 weeks, Reliant built a web based application for NetEffect which allows NetEffect consultants to log in and record their time from anywhere that has internet access. This allows Technicians to record their time at the client site, while it is all fresh in their minds. Technicians are also able to see a complete history of all time entries made against any client, giving them a complete history of the work that has been done.
NetEffect management is able to see reports in real time which detail what work has been reported and give an up to the minute report on how efficiently and profitably the company is running. The system takes the employer tax, retirement contributions, and health care expenses of the consultants into account when calculating costs to apply against gross revenue and estimate profit. NetEffect has instituted a bonus system where their consultants get a percentage of the profits that they earn for the company. The web based system allows consultants to see how many billable hours that they have put in and compares that with ideal numbers which are calculated taking holidays and other variables into account. This gives the consultants a carrot to chase and includes them in the hunt for more efficiency with immediate and automatic feedback.
The system allows NetEffect management to review and approve each time log entry made by a consultant. If the manager finds a problem, they can modify the log. If the log is acceptable, they approve the log. Sets of approved logs can be automatically emailed to the companies' bookkeeper in a format which is easily importable to Quickbooks.