TDMS Blog

Data-driven marketing - it's the key to strong relationships. And I'm not just talking about delivering formal marketing campaigns. Once the domain of tech geeks and specialists, data is now an integral part of your business. It enables you to maximise profits, gather business intelligence, manage customer relationships and plan for business development. But more importantly, it gives you the ability to understand your customers.

The challenge for many of our clients is therefore not data creation, it's data cleanliness and knowing whether or not the information at hand is realiable. And responsibility for data does not just fall to the marketing or accounts person in your office. Contributing to clean data is the responsibility of everyone who has access to your Timeslips database. And the reason they should care? Clean data allows you to develop strong relationships with your clients.

According to recent surveys*, two of the core challenges facing businesses today are customer retention and sales conversion. If you fall into this category and you're working with data that is old and inefficient, this can have many implications for your business.

If it's been a while since you cleaned-up your database, you could be working with "junk" - data that hinders your ability to communicate with customers and to make effective decisions around future growth. Since it's used every day, your Timeslips database is your ideal source of in-house market research. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you conduct a regular clean-up.

The Financial Service Reforms are coming. It's time to get ready.

From 1 July 2012, the landscape of the Australian financial services sector will change forever. To make sure you are ready for this change, it's time to start planning how your firm will shift from commission and volume based payment structures to a model of "Fee for Service" charging.

Implementing a "Fee for Service" model will involve major changes to your internal systems and can take months to effectively implement. Factors such as how to calculate staff chargeout rates, how to price your range of services, and how to monitor time spent on projects must all be resolved well before you introduce the model to your clients.

One software solution you may consider is Sage Timeslips, our most popular choice of software, as it provides you with benefits such as timers, simple billing, automated reporting and KPI dashboards for analysing firm productivity.

The clock is ticking, now is the time to act, and through careful long-term planning, we at Time & Data Management can implement, train and provide you with on-call support to smoothly integrate Sage Timeslips into your systems.

Time-based billing is still the preferred method for corporate legal spending, according to a recent survey completed by Mallesons Stephen Jaques.

According to the survey, which included 374 respondents of which 44 percent were generl counsel, 50 percent of respondents said fees billed at an hourly rate make up over 90 percent of their total legal spend.

Read full article: Billabe hour reigns in-house Cited: 28 August 2011 by Lawyers Weekly

With the constant rise of the internet in business, most of us know the benefits of analytics and some would say that we're obsessed with tracking how customers behave online. Problem is, when it comes to tracking our offline performance, most of us haven't got a clue of where to start.

Business metrics are an important consideration for every soloist as our most valuable resource is time, which must often be measured against the delivery of a service.

If you think about the drivers of success in your business, it's likely they relate to existing customer behaviour such as loyalty, word of mouth and their ability to pay your bill. But if I ask you how you're performing on each of these drivers, are you able to easily tell me?

With the right tools in your office and a small amount of discipline, measuring your offline metrics is a relatively easy task. It's a matter of tracking your time in relation to productivity then assigning them both to a billable client's job.

Imagine this. You've spent the past few weeks working on a client project that is split into five key tasks:

1. Client meetings

2. Client communications

3. Market research

4. Document drafting and

5. Travel

The project is a fixed-fee invoice so you've already worked out that the client can afford to pay, and you're now in control of how you allocate your tasks to deliver the project.

As you work through the project, you track your time using an automatic timer then assign each job to the client and the appropriate task. All is going well and the client is thrilled with your work but at the end of the project, you realise you've short-changed yourself by a good 20 hours and there's no way you can bill it back to the job.

For most of us, that write-off is probably in the range of $2,000 - $3,000, which is a considerable amount of income when you think of it like that. But before you throw in the towel, an analysis of the client tells a much clearer story.

Skimming through your emtrics you can clearly see that in the past your alone, the client in question brout you $60,000 worth of brand new income simply through referrals by word of mouth. They've already paid you $20,000 for the project just delivered and have signed-up[ for another project starting next quarter. With a budgeted sales forecast of $120,000 per annum, that's a very big chunk of your revenue taken care of.

Suddenly, in context, that write-off doesn't look too bad and would be considered by many as a solid investment in a long-term client relationship. The point being that with the right information available at a click, the real value of each client in relation to your business is very clear. So why don't we track these metrics like we track our metrics online?

There is never a better time than now to review your business metrics to gain real knowledge about your clients and how productive your days have been. The results will be excellent inputs for cash flow forecasts and annual budgets.

As a professional service business, what tools do you use to manage your time?

As a software systems expert, I work across a broad range of industries with clients in Australia and New Zealand to assist them in managing and tracking their time. In every single case, the underlying challenge is to increase efficiency and boost profits, all while freeing-up the business to focus on what it does best - servicing customers.

For professional service businesses, time is a valuable commodity which means that time management software is an integral part of achieving success. Our software of choice for this purpose is Sage Timeslips - one of the most popular time and billing software programs on the market - as it offers the benefits of: capturing chargeable time; simplified billing; and efficiency in analysing firm productivity.

Aside from these software functions, the true genius of Timeslips is in using the application in the business to proactively drive growth. For example, tracking and managing time can assist in driving loyalty campaigns and lead generation activity, monitoring customer lifetime value, and even creating more efficient event mailings. All by reviewing a simple, quick report that is customised to suit the business and the user.