Accurate Billing - A news article taken from Bizplus.ie.

Brokers Coyle Hamilton recently adopted Tempus Pro Online software for time charging, client billing and productivity monitoring. And the firm says the investment is already paying off.

By John Collins

Professional services have come under increasing scrutiny with reports of accounting irregularities and over-billing by consultants. While many firms still rely on simple paper based timesheets, more progressive firms are turning to timesheet software. This enables them to analyse the hours worked by staff and see which clients and projects are more or less profitable.

One of the market leaders in this area is indigenous software house Coretime, whose Tempus Pro product has been around since the DOS days but is now available as a fully Web-based package. Tempus Pro has over 6,000 users worldwide and one of the latest firms to take it up is Coyle Hamilton, Ireland's largest locally owned insurance brokers.

Tempus Pro Online can be run either on the internet or a company's intranet so that it is available to staff even when they are off-site. It has powerful reporting and analysis tools which enable managers to quickly see whether clients or projects have been profitable and which members of staff are most productive. According to Derek Vard, general manager of Coretime: "Anyone who is in the business of selling time should use a product like ours." Vard says that even firms that charge fixed fees for their services should implement it to ensure they are making a profit on their clients.

Coyle Hamilton initially implemented the product in its Employee Benefits division, which manages pensions on behalf of corporate clients such as Ryanair, and the company has now rolled out the software in its brokerage division. "Prior to this we had different systems for time recording, debtors ledger, billing and commission recovery," explains Declan Tyrell, financial controller with the Employee Benefits division. As a result of the new system, Coyle Hamilton can easily identify if a large amount of unchargeable time is being spent on a particular client and then attempt to establish why this is happening. Teamwork is also a large part of its brokerage division and Tempus Pro allows managers to identify the most productive team and see if their work practices can be standardised and adopted by the rest of the group.

"For us it's fundamentally a profitability tool which we use proactively," says Tyrell. "One of the bonuses for us is that with policies rising in price so much, we can justify our charges to clients by showing exactly how much work goes into their policy. Bigger clients are now trying to move to a fee basis of paying rather than commission, particularly when their insurance policy may cost millions."

As well as monitoring productivity, Tempus Pro ensures recovery of payment for work done by providing a full history of work done on behalf of a client complete with notes made by staff. It can export this data as tabbed delimited text for importing into financial and accounting packages, while more seamless hooks are provided for working with Access Accounts, Sage and Exchequer Enterprise.

Typically timesheets - whether paper based or electronic - were filled in at the end of the working day or week resulting in employees padding their hours as they could not accurately remember what they worked on. Tempus Pro tackles this by being available on the user's desktop at all times. Users are encouraged to have it open at all times as it also stores contact details, links to relevant documents and other useful information on a particular client. Coyle Hamilton is using this aspect of the product to enhance their CRM programme.

Coretime makes aggressive claims for the return on investment provided by Tempus Pro Online. In a company of 25 employees with an average hourly cost of €35, Coretime claims the customer will make an annual saving of about €11,000 by moving from paper to electronic time recording. Presuming the time saved is then billed out to customers, anywhere up to another €50,000 revenue could be generated (based on an hourly charge of €160 per hour). Tyrell supports this view; he says that since introducing the system last September, billable hours have increased.

Tempus Pro Online installs on a Web server using Windows NT 4 or 2000 and running Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 or higher. Users machines need to be running Internet Explorer 5.5 or later. A typical setup for five users costs around € 3,000 while additional users can be added for € 300 each. The Task Manager and Staff Planner modules which give enhanced group working capabilities are priced separately but an all in one package for five users costs around € 4,500.

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