We’ve all been there. 

You have a to-do list which is a mile long, bullet pointing important tasks and deadlines, yet you sit in front of your screens, cross-checking your engineers time entries to ensure your engineers’ time is being accounted for correctly – the last thing you want is money being left on the table!

This heavily manual task seems to zap time out of every month – and we feel your pain.This task is only amplified by each client having unique business needs, and subsequently slightly different SLA’s. Which only increases the time entry mistakes amongst the engineers, especially the new starters.

The real kicker is, as your business grows, so does your time spent cross-checking time entries increases – the joy!

Anyone responsible for sanitizing time entries before the billing run would relate to this story – and frustration. At this stage, we would love to get these corrected by the engineers so that they know to code their time entry correctly next time. But there is this small problem of time pressure. Time pressure to check the time entries and invoice the client. Even if we drill all these rules for different clients into our team (some of us have A3 posters in the office 😊), there comes the time when we have a new engineer joined the team who is un-aware of all the rules we have built up over the years or misses them even though you have handed him/her the complete list - that pesky glitch of human error! And the same process repeats all over again the next month.

Time entries is how MSPs charge their clients, especially for anything outside the support agreement. Therefore, it is very important to not only have them coded correctly but also to have relevant information for the client.

Having incorrectly coded time entries can not only result in revenue loss but also creating overhead for accounts departmentwhen a client is incorrectly charged. The process to unwind invoices is very costly, let alone the bad impression left with the client (engineers sometimes do not realize that);  for each invoice that needs to be credited or re-issued, it involves the client’s account department, the accounts department on MSP’s side, and the account manager for the client to clarify the charges - and let's not forget the engineer who carried out the actual work. Most often or not, as an MSP you end up spending more money unwinding an invoice than it is worth in the first place.

Imagine a world where your engineers’ time entries were automatically cross-checked against SLA’s, and flagged for errors, alerting the engineer to correct their time entry. Imagine the time-saving… and increase in billing accuracy!

This is essentially why TimeSanity was born! 

Coming from Lancom's own frustration with time reconciliation, invoice queries and manual processes, the application was written initially for internal use, to help the team bridge the gap between billing and engineering. The app is now used across a growing list of Managed Services providers, helping other IT companies remove the headache of manual Connectwise time entry checking, providing accurate billing, lessinvoice complaints, enabling their teams to focus on what matters: providing the best service to customers.

Through creation of advanced customised rules based on agreements and companies  (think about it as Zapier for Connectwise time entries), TimeSanity sends daily emails to engineers explaining why the rule was triggered and how they should fix it, therefore educating staff on how to record time correctly… in the first place.

If you're looking for a better way to sanitize your ConnectWise time entries, explore the benefit's TimeSanity could bring to your business, check our website for more information.