Automating Time Capture Using Chrometa
In the profession of public accounting, we use our knowledge, skills and experience to perform services for our clients. Whether we use a fixed fee arrangement or we use billable hours, it is important for us to know where our time goes and how we spend it as we work on behalf of our clients. Sometimes we don’t record small things like a five- or 10-minute phone call with a client or an email we prepare to answer a client’s “quick” question. This time gets lost as either administrative time or, alternatively, we record a quarter hour to the client every now and then to capture the billable value of these quick projects.
A software product call Chrometa is about to change all of that. I have recently been using this software on the office computer to see just how well it automates the process of capturing the time I spend on projects and services. As we all know, it is difficult for accountants to manage the capture of time manually, and we have developed all sorts of mechanisms for trying to do a good job at capturing the time we spend, especially the billable time. Many times, however, the manual system breaks down when we get busy. When we get to the end of the day, we have forgotten the smaller 15-minute phone calls and emails with clients that occurred throughout the day. As a result, we fail to enter this time into our time and billing system.
Enter Chrometa! This software tracks what you open on your computer and records the time you spend working on it. For example, as I type this article, Chrometa is working in the background on my computer keeping track of the time I spend on the project. It appears in the list with the title of the document next to the amount of time I spent typing and editing the document. Right now, Chrometa has recorded 10 minutes of time working on writing and editing the first three paragraphs of this article.
Chrometa tracks everything you do on your computer as well as when you are away from your computer. If you go help a colleague, when you come back and start using the mouse or keyboard again, Chrometa will prompt you with a window asking you if you were in a meeting, at lunch or on the phone. You can select one of these options and/or add some descriptive text to the prompt and then log the entry. This can be edited later if you wish or, if you have accurately described it initially, it provides a reminder about the 10-minute phone call you had with a client or how long you took to help that colleague.
The software tracks automatically every software application you launch on the workstation and every window that is open. Through preferences, you can eliminate items that are less than an amount you pick so the 10 seconds that you had an error message on your screen will not show in your list. You can also categorize software you use so it lists the items under a particular category. For example, you can put all the email together in a category. It will track your accounting software and the clients you are accessing as separate line items. It will also track the opening and closing of clients within the software and record the time you spend on each depending on how the accounting software manages the change of clients.
The software will even track time spent connected to remote applications such as Citrix Published Applications or Terminal Services Remote programs. The software knows when you launch a particular application that is not located on your computer, and it tracks the time you were in that program. The software is not as robust with Microsoft’s Terminal Server Remote programs as it is when using the same application on the workstation. It will not always be able to detect the switch between clients in this environment and record it for you. However, for those of you who use Citrix, it will detect the client changes in the software and will record those changes for you depending on how the accounting software performs these changes. One of the nice features in Citrix is that it will detect some of the switching that you do between parts of the application such as going from the chart of accounts to the trial balance. This tracking process within accounting software on a remote machine is not always 100 percent accurate, but it does detect some of these changes within the accounting software and records them for you as separate line items. While some may consider this a failing, I do not because it is very difficult to monitor something happening on another machine especially when your software is not running on that remote machine. The fact it can capture a large amount of what you are doing on a remote machine when the software is not even installed on the remote machine is very impressive for any product.
Switching back and forth between open software is very flawless and unnoticed by the user. The software simply stops the timer on the now inactive item and starts recording the time on the newly active item. Chrometa will simply sum up the time you were working in each application, email or document when bouncing back and forth between several different items.
At the time I wrote this, the most recent product release was 2.0.1.7. The developers are continuing to work on the product, and in the few months that I have been using it they have had three enhancement releases. The software is very solid, does not seem to cause any problems on the workstation when being used, runs in the background except when you are reviewing information it has collected and, best of all, it provides you with a complete history of everything you did in a given day. You can even go back and review previous dates. The software costs $99 per user and includes free email and phone support. The company does not have multi-user pricing but will discuss pricing for multiple users upon request.
With all the great features Chrometa does have, it will not replace the process of entering your time into the time and billing system. Chrometa does not integrate with any time and billing software and will not replace the processes for entering time into these systems. Chrometa is a tool to help you capture automatically the things you work on each day and ensure accuracy in capturing all time spent working. It eliminates the time you spend having to manually track what you are working on during the day.
This product has proven to be very simple and easy to use, and it allows me to do less manual tracking of the things I do every day on or near my computer and spend more time getting work done. I can review the captured activities at the end of the day to ensure I am capturing all the time I spent working on client and non-client related work. The software is a handy tool to add to our time tracking processes to make accurately capturing time automated and much easier. Give it a try by downloading the trial from the Chrometa website and see if it is as helpful to you as it was to me.
Very cool! I love how someone has figured out how to take what was once called SpyWare and turn it into a business productivity solution…haha
I know this would have helped me dramatically when I was tracking my time… or not tracking it for that matter!
It would be great to hear from a firm that has implemented to get a feel for if they have noticed improved billings due to the software. In theory the average firm would only need to recapture about 1 hour per staff memeber to pay for it.
I’m going to download it and check it out, I’m scared to know how much time I spend on things…..
I’m guessing we won’t see an endorsement from Ron Baker on their site anytime soon :0P
Just a heads up, we have a couple of attorney clients who use the product and it has definitely caused issues with IE crashing. The work around for this client has been to run IE without any add ons and this seems to have alleveated the problem. While researching the issue, we had been running it on a couple of workstations here without incident.
Hi George,
JP from Chrometa here. Thanks for the heads up, do you remember how recently this issue came up? We haven’t had any users report this issue in the past several months.
Back in fall 2009, when we first released Chrometa 2.0, we did have some users report issues with IE. We resolved all of the reported issues in 2009. If you know of anyone who is still experiencing any issues with IE, could you please have them contact me directly?
Thanks!
JP
JP Ren
Co-founder & Product Manager
Chrometa, LLC
jp@chrometa.com
908-892-8960
Right about that, no endorsement here–we are making your product obsolete.
Time and billing programs are the buggy whip of the knowledge era.
Customers don’t buy time, thus firms don’t sell time.
Time doesn’t measure value; it’s like plunging a ruler into the oven to determine its temperature.
Over 1,000 professionals firms, across all sectors, operate profitably without tracking time.
Intellectual curiosity would demand one to question how they do it, rather than argue it can’t be, or shouldn’t be, done.
Cordially,
Ron Baker, Founder
VeraSage Institute
http://www.verasage.com
Twitter @ronaldbaker
Welcome to the discussion, Ron- I also favor value billing, but time tracking and management software can serve a use for value-bill firms as well.
Isaac, I completely agree, and that jives with our experience in the market - that accurate timekeeping is a very important part of project management. In some respects, it’s almost MORE important in a flat fee environment, so that you can determine the profitability of your clients and projects.
A lot of our customers do bill on a fixed fee basis, but still keep very accurate timekeeping records with Chrometa for these purposes.
Great discussion here!
Brett Owens
Co-Founder & CEO
Chrometa, LLC
http://www.chrometa.com
916-254-0260
Well, Ron- I wasn’t looking for two of the company’s cofounders to tag team against you… please contribute more on your perspective of value billing.
Well, I would expect the co-founders of the a time and billing company to insist that keeping time is critical.
The problem is it’s nonsense on stilts. Here’s the issue: empirical evidence.
There are over 1,000 firms–across all professional sectors, from accounting, advertising, to law and IT firms–that don’t use timesheets, period. They are very successful, not to mention profitable.
How do they do it?
If you don’t know the answer, perhaps you should dig deeper?
Respectfully,
Ron Baker
I am going to interceed here and hopefully stop this argument. I agree with Ron about value billing - I think it is a superior solution to time based billing. However, as you well know the accounting industry is full of firms that bill by the hour because it is easy and they think it is cost effective. Yes, I know all the arguments for and against this method of billing. On top of that some firms use a blended method where they bill by the hour but never less than they billed the year before. The blended method gives them the ability to not lose the technology and other productivity improvements they make and capture a higher realization rate for those improvements. My article was not about whether any of these methods are right, wrong, or indifferent.
The reason I wrote about this software solution is because I feel it provides value in helping remember what it was that I worked on during the day and how as a professional you spend you time. Chrometa automates the process of capturing my activities and helps me understand how my day is spent. Some firms would definitely see this as a benefit by using it to more accurately capture time for the time and billing system. Other firms would see this as a tool for helping their firms understand what it is an employee worked on and how productive they are. Tracking my activities and time spent on them has nothing to do with how profitable the firm is and does not necessarily have to translate into an hourly time and billing system. Knowing what is being done with the time being spent working is helpful for other reasons.
When I track the time I spend working on a project, it can provide an idea of whether I am productive or not. It can also provide some benchmarking for improvement - say for example I work on two tax returns that have the same type of information. I can compare the time I spend working on return A and see if my time is less on return B. This does not mean that I automatically translate that into a bill to the client - it tells me if I am more effective working on return B than I was on return A. Capturing my activities in this way has absolutely nothing to do with how I bill for my work.
Chrometa is a tool for monitoring how you spend you time and finding where time is wasted. While some will use it for filling in their time sheets others will use it for improving their skills and managing their activities better. The primary reason I like Chrometa is because it gives me the ability to see how I spend my day and try to figure out if there was a better way to organize my activities. It also helps me remember what it is that I did throughout the day and perhaps helps me identify activities that are non-value added. Who cares if I bill for this or not using an hourly billing system or a value billing system. That is irrelevant.
I appreciate the information you have shared in relation to this post and perhaps you should consider talking with the magazine about writing an article on the benefits of value billing and how technology can help firms with value billing. I see Chrometa as a means to help people understand what it is they are doing with their time. It is my contention that this software is helpful to all firms even those who value bill. It is just that it is useful for different reasons based on the type of billing the firm uses.
One other thing specifically for Ron. Chrometa is NOT a time and billing software. It has no means of billing anyone or generating a bill to a client. It simply records the time I spend working on something on my computer such as an email or a tax return. There is no billing component to this software at all.