| Q. What is the background
of Coretime?
Chief Executive Officer Ray Nolan founded Coretime in
1994. Originally known as Raven Computing, the company initially provided bespoke
software solutions to a wide cross section of industries. In 1990 the company
released its first shrink-wrapped product, a fee management system for lawyers.
This was followed in 1994 by Tempus, a DOS based professional time and billing
product. The product went through several iterations; Windows 16bit, Windows 32-bit
before being redesigned from scratch in its present web incarnation. The company
has always been headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, a ready source of excellent
software developers. It now has representation in Ireland, UK, USA and Australia.
Coretime, which evolved out of Raven Computing in 1997, focuses solely on professional
timesheet solutions. Back To Top
Q. What is the corporate mission of
Coretime?
To provide timesheet solutions which empower professionals
with information they require in order to profit, and to deliver these as shrink-wrapped
software or as an online service. Back To Top
Q. How is the company financed?
Coretime is self-financing and has had all its development funded from over ten
years of exceptional sales and service. Despite having invested heavily in development
during the 2000- 2001, the company is completely debt free. Back
To Top
Q. Who is on the company's Board of
Directors?
Ray Nolan, Chairman, President, and CEO, Coretime
Derek
Vard FCPA, General Manager, Coretime
Michael Butler Back
To Top
Q. What future products and services
are planned?
In order to deliver essential Internet-based business
applications, Coretime offers a complete, integrated Project Accounting service
that includes components for recording, billing, profit and support. Coretime
will continue to deliver new features, functionality, and additional modules that
complement the core competency of its service and make it easier for companies
to optimise the return on their time. In addition, we will deliver new components
that extend the use of collected data to aid transparency for our customers clients.
Back To Top
Q.
What is Project Accounting?
Project Accounting software is specifically designed to improve a professional
services company's ability to profit from the projects it undertakes. It facilitates
the recording of time and expenses, and then delivers the data to project sheets
so that it may be billed on to the client or an internal business unit. Other
components include comprehensive work-in-progress analysis, improved customer
care and responsiveness, motivating employees towards greater productivity and
introducing the notion of recovery - the difference between what is on the clock
and what is on the invoice. Back To Top
Q. What is Work In Progress (WIP)
Management ?
Proper WIP management improves the profitability and effectiveness
of the professional services organization. It makes it easy to understand time
and resource utilisation and ensures that resources used on billable projects
actually reach an invoice. The premise behind good WIP management is that WIP
has no concrete value to a company until it is invoiced. Empowering project managers
with up-to-the-minute project status information means that projects can be easily
tracked, analysed, and optimised, so the best possible return is achieved for
the organisation. Importantly Coretime users can analyse WIP across the whole
organisation, by project, manager, customer or under any number of customisable
headings. Want aged WIP analysis by project location or manager? No Problem! Back
To Top
Q. What is Productivity as applied
to professional services organisations?
Coretime are unique in promoting
productivity among the professionals in your organisation. All time recorded is
categorised as chargeable, non-chargeable (e.g. administration) or unavailable
(e.g. Holidays). Graphical prompts are used to reinforce the notion that a filled
timesheet is not as valuable as one which is filled with chargeable time. This
information is made readily available for managers and proves useful for HR reviews
and resource assignment. Back To Top
Q. What is Task Management?
Task Management enables your organisation to record and monitor all of your customer
issues. It can be applied to any professional services context and ensures you
meet all of your customers demands. Unusually, Coretime's task management is integrated
fully within the time recording process. Record the time and update the tasks
status within the same process ensuring that not only are service levels met and
improved upon but also the resources used are costed accordingly. Significantly,
the customer can log their own issues directly from your website into the task
database and review progress over the web. Your organization as a whole will improve
the service it delivers, helping to retain existing customers and enhance their
overall satisfaction. Back To Top
Q. I am a manager. How can I benefit
from using Coretime?
Up to the minute timesheet information, recorded
by your team regardless of their physical location, online access to project WIP
and reporting, budget V actual, task management and scheduling. With Coretime,
your entire resource usage is integrated into a single comprehensive system. Human
resources managers review the effectiveness of employees; check holidays and sick
leave or the status of overtime or time-in-lieu, where it applies. Analyse projects
under headings that are appropriate to your business and review which projects
or types of projects are best performers. Financial managers are assured that
all WIP gets billed and, with comprehensive debtors and analysis, you can be sure
that time and expense issues do not go unresolved. You can drill into debtors
to invoice and even WIP level. Back To Top
Q. I'm a customer support manager.
How can I benefit from using Coretime?
Coretime's task management is
designed to help you. Tasks are assigned to individuals or teams, can be reviewed
by client, project or status. It is easy to capture all details of customer problems
and enquiries, whether they come by phone, fax, email, or even directly from your
Web site. Manage load and flow across your support team and analyse your volume
by task characteristic and customer segment. Software developers ensure bugs are
fixed, accountants ensure accounts are filed; engineers ensure quality standards
are adhered to. Regardless of your industry, linking task management to timesheets
ensures progress is tracked, and that it gets billed. For support managers, it
is important to know your company is adhering to agreed service levels. In addition,
you can drill into an employees task list to quickly identify which tasks may
require your assistance. Coretime also includes many pre-configured reports to
display support usage so you don't need to manually aggregate data. Back
To Top
Q. We don't actually invoice our
time. Does Coretime still apply?
A key benefit of Coretime is its ability
to create invoices directly from within work-in-progress review. If your team
is part of a larger R+D facility, or has no need to create invoices, you will
still benefit from exceptional time and expense recording and reporting. Managing
projects is all about resource usage and optimisation. Coretime delivers your
data in a readily accessible format. Back To Top
Q. What level of reporting is included?
Can I use a standard report writer?
We have endeavoured to cover all
of your reporting needs within the Coretime suite. Over 200 categorised and filterable
reports allow you to see your data in the format that suits you. Import the resultant
report to Excel for graphing or e-mail the report up the line or to a client.
Should the need arise, the data is held in standard SQL database and is accessible
to most good report writers. We have included a rudimentary query analyser to
get you started. Back To Top
Q. What do Coretime believe are the
key factors to be considered when choosing a Project Accounting/Timesheet solution?
Data entry and accessibility is the key. Awkward unwieldy data entry panels will
frustrate your users and lead them to postpone use. Software should have moved
on since the days when timesheets were considered the bain of the professional.
The data must also deliver on its promise. The recorded data should not end at
project level, but must go through to full aged WIP analysis and invoicing. There
should be no duplication of effort. Expenses entered should be used to repay employees,
scheduled work should make recording time simpler, task updates should refresh
project sheets. Back To Top
Q. How scalable is Coretime?
Coretime has the capacity to scale to the largest of enterprises. A single server
can host thousands of users. Back To Top
Q. What platforms do I need to have
in order to run Coretime?
Since Coretime is web based, all you need
is a computer or an alternative device that can run a Web browser. It doesn't
matter what type of hardware or operating system you're running. We also provide
a Windows™ version which will operates on the Windows 95, 98,2000, and NT platforms. Back
To Top
Q. How do I get upgrades to Coretime?
Customers who have subscribed to Coretime's Annual Support contract are entitled
to FREE product upgrades which can be downloaded from a secure area of the Company
website. Typically upgrades are available every 2 or 3 months. Back
To Top
| 
