By Mark.
(The following is transcribed as originally submitted.)
Remember your first day back to grade school after a summer of lazing in the sun? Brand spanking new notebook in hand, the spine cracking as you open it for the first time, a pristine blank canvas awaiting your brilliant ideas, newly sharpened pencil carefully dating the top right corner with your best penmanship…
It never lasts long though. Scribbles and doodles, girls numbers, AC/DC logos in the margins — but it was so great to start a new year with a fresh approach. A clean slate.
Although times have changed, I’ve been doing the same thing each January. Backing up files, deleting old jobs off the servers, wrap up the years accounting - a ceremonial spring cleaning of sorts. Now with the new year underway I look at my day-to-day tasks and aspire to do things better, simpler. There is always one bottleneck that seems to be a cloud hanging overhead time. Or more importantly, time management. There must be a better way to track time — billable time, down time, project timelines.
Recourses.com (go to free resources › benchmarking) suggests 176.25 hours per month, per person are available after vacations, holidays and sick time. They suggest people should be 60% billable or 105.75 billable hours per person, per month.
60% might sound reasonable, but I wasn’t even close. So that leads me to question what I am doing different with my time and how I manage that time. What does your studio do to track time?
We are a design studio with 5 to 8 people working at any given time. We currently use a combination of iCal and Excel to track our time. Each docket has a separate excel file tracking totals per person, total hours remaining in estimate, total hours to-date etc.
We’ve looked into several time keeping and studio management programs, but are finding it difficult to decide what to invest the money and time into. Looked at Clients and Profits seems like the best application out there, but very, very steep cost. And it is a classic application, not a true OSX app. Stopwatch Plus and Time Sheet Manager seems like a very simple solution, but to take full advantage of the software you need to also use their Creative Billing software which is also a Classic app and seems like a very crude program. Time Assistant tested this out and it seems very good. One problem is I could not find out how to archive the old jobs. Don’t want to delete records, but also don’t want to see 200 jobs on the list when only 10 are active.
What do you use at your studio?
creative business periodially reviews office management programs. actually they have their reader comment on their likes and dislikes which makes for a kind of valuable review. i agree clients & profits is pricey, but even then is probably worth it as soon as there are a few people in the office. we use a program called studio manager. its filemaker pro based. sure it has plenty of flaws but it does at lot as well, if you know filemaker you can customize it. oh, and it cost much less than clients& profits.
On Jan.15.2004 at 10:14 AM