time & billing for CPAs

[stewartcpa]

I'm shopping for a new time & billing software that will integrate with Quickbooks. I like the TimeSlips Demo, but have heard bad things about its integration with Quickbooks. Any recommendations?

GS

[brecor]

There isn't much out there for the accounting profession. I just did a survey for intuit, and it appears they are in the process of doing a time & billing package. Who knows when that will be released is anyone's guess as intuit is pretty hush-hush about their forthcoming releases.

For my practice i use VPM by CPA Software. Have used for probably about 6 years now. It is a real nice package, but no qb integration. We chose it over timeslips due to, at least at that time, it having project tracking capabilities.

[BFRieck]

Be careful with Timeslips. We began using timeslips when it was still shareware (at least 15, maybe 20 years ago). I'm not saying it was at its best in those days, but since Sage bought it, it has gotten more and more complicated with each new version. The current version is somewhat buggy and I believe Sage knows its does not integrate with QB. The problem with timekeeping software, much like accounting software is that once you have sold the package to a user, he doesn't ever have to buy anything else. Enron notwithstanding, double entry accounting has not really changed in about 500 years. Accordingly, unless you can sell tech support, payroll tax tables, supplies, or new versions, you can't really do much to generate revenues from your user base. New version sales generate tech support revenues so they are attractive to software companies. Sometimes they go too far. (eg, it is generally accepted that Lotus Version 5 is the best - the later versions are not as good.)

[Allan Watton]

Quickbooks Pro has its own time billing/recording system. It's pretty useless if you need different fee rates per client/activity or budgeting per fee earner, but if you simply want somewhere to record your time and automatically create invoices, use that.

If you want a time recording / billing solution which provides FULL integration AUTOMATICALLY with Quickbooks, suggest you look at BillQuick from BQE Software. It's excellent. You can download a version for 30 days free trial (fully functioning) and it is an exceptional piece of software. Suggest you visit www.bqe.com.

Best of luck.

[hartford]

Allan
I think the original post is rather old but I bought Timeslips years ago from Sage & it was worse than useless. Interested what you say about BillQuick - does it integrate with UK versions of QB?

[Allan Watton]

Hartford

No, unfortunately not. If you're interested, it's because the Software Developers Toolkit from Intuit (SDK - and what BillQuick uses for its integration with Quickbooks) does not support the UK version.

We have spent the best part of a year looking for time billing software which operates correctly, provides good fee earning and work in progress visibility and integrates into an accounting system. We looked at both Accountants and solicitors time recording anf fee earning systems. We cast our eye over systems from £1,000 to £50,000. None of them provided what we wanted - and we don't want anything particularly sophisticated, I assure you.

We went back to basics and mapped our business processes and sent these to a number of supplier for them to determine what software would fit our business. Other than Billquick, nothing else really suited us. We found the BillQuick product by "accident" (a web search for Quickbooks integrated products). They offer a free trial and we went for it. It seems to work very well indeed and has a lot of features, particularly in the way invoices can be laid out and non-fee earning time can be recorded and monitored. Budgets, specific fee rates per customer according to activity/project undertaken are also included.

Our problem culminated in that it doesn't link to the UK version of Quickbooks. To cut a long story short, we eventually ordered (last week) the US version of Quickbooks as we decided that losing the VAT return and the standard layout for P&L & Balance sheet was a small price to pay for full access to the data with '000's of US based develpment tools whereby we can write our own VAT return, P&L & Balance sheets.

We know the integration between BillQuick and US Quickbooks works like a dream - all payments, invoices, Estimates etc. are all linked seamlessly.

Our only potential problem is that if US Quickbooks contains some nasties that we might not be aware of. We believe that it operates multi-currency etc., so the downside should be limited, but if there are any nasties and we can't find a way around them, we'll be back to manual postings into Quickbooks from BQE.

I'll keep you informed as to progress if you're interested.

Best regards.

Allan