We know that in a professional services business, your time IS your money. Keeping track of the time you spend working on client projects, issues and tasks is a crucial piece to understanding everything from budget usage to billing clients.
The new Timers Module in Accelo provides you with the fastest, easiest and smartest way to keep track of your time (and your money).
Video: Watch the new Timers Module in action!
Let's take a peek at the benefits of Timers:
When you want to quickly start work on a project after a conversation with a colleague or a call with a client, you can use Timers to begin tracking your time immediately.
Starting a timer in the new Timers Module is super easy - simply click New, name your timer and press Save.
You can also enter an existing amount of time to start from (useful if you've been chatting with a client for a few minutes when you want to start the timer) and you can optionally choose what the time is against.
Note: You no longer have to search for the client, project, issue or any other thing you are going to log your time against before you get started. This is a huge factor in making it faster than ever to track your time.
First off, Timers runs in the background automatically, so you can focus on getting work done and feel confident that your time is being tracked properly. If you start a new timer, we’ll automatically pause any time that is already running. If you restart a timer, we’ll pause the other ones too.
Secondly, Timers makes it easy to quickly search your clients, projects, milestones and tasks. The Timers Module gives you a “google-esque” way to quickly find what you are looking for. Accelo will find matches for you even if you can only remember the name of your client or project. You can easily drill your search down with minimal information.
Lastly, we make it easy to track your time by auto-populating the activity window when it’s time to log your work. The title of the timer becomes the subject, the time spent working is dropped in and the object the time is logged against is filled in as well. If you forget to choose which object to log your time against, no worries - you get the same super robust search functionality described earlier in the post in the new activity window too!
Logging time on 'Add Activity' has also become more powerful with the release of timers.
Accelo’s Timers is power-packed with smart tools under its hood. Aside from the auto-pause when a new timer begins, we’ve done a ton of work on the back-end to ensure that Timers continues working even if your computer isn’t!
When you start a new timer, we’ll keep track of time outside of your web browser, so if it or your computer happens to crash, you won’t lose any of your tracked time. You can check this out now by logging into your account from a different browser. You’ll see a list of timers there ticking away just as you left them!
This back-end functionality is also going to enable us to extend Timers beyond the browser in future desktop and mobile app releases!
Another smart feature of Timers is its ability to get out of your way. We know there are times, roles where the Timers Module is a distraction to your work. We’ve created the Timers Module so you can easily open it from the top navigation or minimize it to a single persistent row. You can even close Timers completely, but still have it running in the background just a click away!
If you’ve got any questions on how to use Timers or just want to see this new feature in action, join us for a special webinar session later on this week. To access the webinar, come back to this post on the day and time designated below that works best for you and follow the link beside it! See you then!
Update: due to a technical headache with the Join.me system we're using (the one where it gives you one invitation link before you save the webinar, and then another after) we've had to move the session to Wednesday for New York, London, Berlin, Cape Town and Dubai timezones.
