Intervals: Managing Time With Invoices And Documents

An integral part of project management and business, time management can keep projects and people on the move, ensuring success. Fortunately for businesses of all sizes, complicated software that goes out of date is a thing of the past, and is being replaced by web 2.0 time management applications.

Online and updated by the developer at no cost to you, Intervals is one of these applications. Designed to track time, Intervals also provides a platform for invoicing, reports, and document storage. To get to know the application and its capabilities, let’s take a closer look.

The first process is the setup process, which Intervals breaks into 7 stages. Set the roles for the staff (administrator, manager, etc.), then the types of work where you set rates of pay based on position, and then modules for tracking. Modules let you see how much time is spent on a particular area. For example, if you want to track research within the project, research would be the module. Status is the last element of the setup process, where you can set up the status of modules and projects. They can be closed, open, suspended, or whatever custom status you wish to give. In all of these steps you are allowed to create custom fields, so even if you don’t see the status/role/position you need you can easily enter it. If at some time later you need to change these, or change any of the defaults (including invoicing addresses), they are all accessible through the settings link.

One of the features of Intervals is their unobtrusive link lists for help. If you’re just starting with Intervals as we were, these links speed up the setup process while not taking up valuable screenspace in case you are familiar with the process. In our case Intervals recommended we add some of our team, so we went there next. Under the “People” tab we can enter in our team members, filling in contact information, notes, and setting the level of access we would like to share. If we already have the person’s information, we can import it via vCard, though there is no way to import more than one at a time.

Next Intervals recommends we set up our first project. Not surprisingly this falls under the “Projects” tab, and we can enter in the details of our projects here, including a budget as well as setting an alert for when the budget reaches a level of your choosing. Advanced editing (html) is allowed in the description of the project, and once saved, the Projects tab becomes a dashboard for at a glance project monitoring.

After setting up the project we are free to create the tasks that make up the project, assigning people, setting modules, and making deadlines. Once set up we will be able to see project notes, documents, and progress through the icons under this tab. Task search and filters to view projects by client or manager are on the left of the page, ready for anytime we lose track of a project. Buttons on the right of the page let us print, email, export to PDF and Excel (csv). As with each page in Intervals there is also a small timer that you can start or pause to keep track of your time, which brings us to the “Time” tab.

The Time tab is where all the hours are accrued for all team members, either by manual entry or by timer. Once accrued, hours can be “submitted for approval”, and approved or rejected by the project manager. This all happens on the Time page, so it is a quick, efficient process to handle your hours. Through this tab you can manage timesheets, edit time entries, see a breakdown of hours spent by week (in a graph), and send notifications to members that have not submitted their timesheets.

One of the links under the Time tab, “Where is my time going”, presents a pie chart of where time is spent, filterable by project, work type, people, manager, client, or module. The pie chart, along with Weekly Trends, Project Activity, Summary, Outstanding Balances, the Crosschart for comparisons of people/projects, and the “Break It Down” link for seeing billable vs. unbillable time are all under the Reports tab. All reports are filterable by projects, people, clients, modules, as well as date ranges, and are exportable by print, email, export to PDF and Excel (csv).

Under the “Documents” tab, files can be uploaded, tagged, and assigned to projects. Depending on the plan you have chosen, you can upload up to 5gb. The one project free plan does not include SSL, invoicing, clients, or document storage, but the starting plan for 5 projects and 250mb of storage for $20 a month does.

Last, and certainly not least of the tabs is “Invoices”, where hours worked can be inserted into an invoice at the touch of  button. No more going between spreadsheets for billable amounts and information. Intervals puts it into the invoice for you, with options to include expenses, additional billable items, notes, and payments. Invoices too are exportable by print, email, export to PDF and Excel (csv).

The weakness of Intervals is in the Time tab, which can be confusing at first. Where the other pages are straightforward in function and design, the Time tab is not laid out as clearly, and users may find it counter-intuitive. We also noticed that once a timesheet has been approved, no further changes can be made, which could be a problem for last-minute changes or recalculations. It is easy to “unapprove” the invoice so that it is open again, but it does require extra steps and makes the Time tab interface less appealing.

For individuals and companies looking to manage time through a web application, Intervals is a resource that brings invoicing, reports, and document storage to time management. Though too detailed and costly for low end users, project managers and freelancers that require project specific tracking will find Intervals a strong time manager. To find it and applications like it there is the Listio search manage+timesheets.

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Tags: business, invoices, manage, organize, reports, tasks, time, timesheets
Posted in: Time Management | Respond
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