Setting up Clicktime Clients, Projects and Tasks for New Client

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

There’s probably nothing I loathe more than keeping track of my time.

But off the top of my head…

… time tracking is the best tool ever for tracking productivity.

For this reason alone, making your peace with – and learning to effectively use – time tracking software is worth your investment.

Clicktime, The time tracking application I’ve been using for over three years, has a number of very interesting features, all of which translate directly into benefits for you. Clicktime means business: they’ve been delivering time tracking on the web since before the .com explosion. I like and use this product so much I’ve applied to be an affiliate.

The Clicktime web application is an incredibly rich, and will take some time to master. You may need to rethink your process or vocabulary slightly, to ensure your work meshes well with the Clicktime system. Effective time accounting is not an easy problem, different businesses will solve it in different ways. Clicktime is structured to provide a very effective, but not totally intuitive (for me) way to handle projects and tasks.

Setting up Clicktime properly

Key to effectively time tracking is setting up your Clicktime “company” such that your work style meshes with how Clicktime tracks projects, tasks, and logs time.

Here’s one procedure I use for setting up a new Clicktime project.

One key for using Clicktime is getting the notion of a “client” correct. Clients come in two general classes, internal and external:

External client: Totally separate business entity, pays for services rendered, etc.
Internal client: Either your entire business, or some department, division or business you own that runs it’s own books.

The idea is that a “client” has some sort of accounting requirements. We’ll tie the tracked time into the accounting later.

Setting up your company projects with Clicktime

If you want to get a good grip on how long it takes to accomplish anything in your company, you’ll want to set up some standard Clicktime projects. A project in Clicktime is always associated with a single client. A typical small business might define a set of projects looking something like this:

ISI-1 Business development
ISI-2 Business operations
ISI-3 Product development
ISI-4 Governance
ISI-5 Overhead
ISI-6 IT operations

In this example, “ISI” is the client code, referring to Inventium Systems, Inc.

Here’s where it get’s interesting: Tasks may be associated with multiple projects.

Suppose you have a certain task named “Web Site Maintenance.” Depending on who did this task and for what reason, the time spent on web site maintenance could be billed to any of several projects. If it was your company’s website, you might record the time with the “IT operations” project. If the particular website was associated with a specific marketing campaign, you might record that time under the “Business development” project.

Setting up projects for external clients

Suppose you’re in the IT business, and you have a number of clients. You will set up projects for each client, which might look something like this for a client “Foobar, Inc”:

FBI-1 Web
FBI-2 Network
FBI-3 Security

The short code “FBI” is arbitrary, it’s a convenience for you.

Suppose you create and maintain websites for these clients, where the maintenance work is charged out on an hourly rate. In this case, you would quite reasonably charge the time spent on the same “Web site maintenance” task from the previous example, to the client’s “FBI-Web” project.

There’s much more. The Clicktime documentation is accurate and completely with respect to how to operate the application. But there is very little about how to structure your business to effectively exploit time tracking and accounting capabilities. Which is what you’ll learn in future articles.