In order for communities to expect economic growth and development, they need to have adequate broadband infrastructure to support growing businesses. Design Nine is a Virginia corporation that provides broadband planning and network design services to communities in order to help them expand.
We typically are going into communities that want better broadband infrastructure to help with economic development. I really enjoy meeting people in the community and getting to see a lot of different parts of the country. I also like helping people. A lot of our work is looking at the broadband infrastructure needs in the community. Our clients are looking for advice on how to make sure they have the right broadband infrastructure to support businesses. We write up a set of recommendations of what we think the community needs in order to support businesses. Our work products typically include detailed recommendations and plans on how to get the broadband infrastructure and services the community needs in order to support business expansion and retention.
The most difficult part is invoicing. Our jobs often span several months and some are a fixed fee while others are hourly so billing can be a complicated procedure. We had a lot of trouble generating invoices before we started using Billings Pro. We still have to put a bit of time into accounting for our work activities, but Billings Pro makes the process much easier. Our clients expect very detailed accounting of what we have done for them. Fortunately, we are able to give them everything they expect by using the Billings Pro environment.
Our clients want detailed summaries of our work activities– what we did, who did the work, what work was done, and the day and amount of time spent on the work item. Billings Pro does a good job helping us track all our information and generate reports that we can include with our invoices. Before Billings Pro, we were trying to accomplish this with spreadsheets but it was awkward and time-consuming. With Billings Pro I’m much more confident that we are getting paid for all the work we do because we have proper records.
A big factor in choosing Billings Pro was that we needed the ability to have people using it in different geographical areas. We have people in three different states so we needed a system that allowed everybody to do their time tracking over the Internet. There were a lot of other Mac based time tracking systems, but most of them did not support multiple locations. Many of the time tracking apps made for the Mac are for what I would call the “Lone Eagle” consultant type. They’re made for one person generating simple data and billing information. Billings Pro fit our business because it supports multiple users in multiple locations, and we’ve only had to deal with support once or twice in the last 4 or 5 years.
