Running a small business is like treading water, you’re constantly attempting to get your head well above water and further from drowning, without over exerting yourself, or getting fatigued by just focusing on the water line.

The ability to expand is based on the ability to make a profit, making a profit is done by creating revenue above your hourly/daily/weekly break even point.

If the business is product driven, it’s simply selling enough boxes a day to reach that point. If the business is client based and revenue is from charging these clients, then it’s about having enough clients paying you the right amount of roubles to clear that break even point. For those working in the latter, time is money and time needs to be charged.

Forecasting to a client, estimates on predictive costs and then meeting those accurately is only really possible through practical experience of previous comparable projects. However if this project information is kept in the grey matter, it’s only good for estimating, post project evaluation for future development is made harder and even the best memory is only semi-accurate in a busy office.

So the rational says, keep records of your time.

After searching and trialling for the right product and not finding the specific business processes or adding the value a dynamic company that builds software, would hope for, we decided to right our own. After spending time building components add creating a structure to host these, we started to find many different ways to skin the cat.

While in build we found a very interesting product, Klok. Built using the same tools we were using (Flash and Air), it showed yet another way to log time for client projects. Klok deals with the logging of time specifically, just one of the components we were looking for but even this showed we hadn’t thought of other approaches.

We decided to test run Klok, if only to give more perspective to our own toolset. The results were impressive, it’s a great tool that works well and is very intuitive. If you’re not building your own or just want a time logging tool for projects, it’s a great tool and it’s freeware. You can’t argue with that.

Once ours if finished and polished, we shall release ours under similar terms, it’s a great help when useful tools are readily available .

Useful thinking.

~ by Thinker on 11 - June - 2008.