Peggy Emch, head of marketing for TimeSheets.com and the founder and writer of The Primal Parent, spoke to us about which companies benefit from TimeSheets, upcoming improvements, including a new scheduling feature and especially about the apps they use as a team to stay productive and better server their customers.

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In this show you’ll learn why TimeSheets.com uses…

All About TimeSheets.com & The Apps They Use to Improve Time Tracking

Jimmy Flores: Welcome everybody. This is “How Apps Help Me Grow My Business”. I’m Jimmy from GetApp and before we get started, I want to just let you know about GetApp in case this is the first time you’re hearing the name. Basically what GetApp is it’s a very large directory of business applications so let’s say that you were searching for ways to track time. Well instead of going to Google and searching a hundred different word combinations and ending up in probably a lot of irrelevant searches, what happens when you come to GetApp, you’ll be able to make one search and you’ll find all of the available online applications that are exactly for that business need. It’s pretty awesome to see the time that you save, the business apps you discover, you’ll likely discover so many apps that would be very difficult for them to appear in search and just because it might not appear on the first page of Google, that might not mean that they’re not awesome tools that are just the right tool for your size and your business. Jump over to GetApp and check it out. If you have any questions, write to us. We’re there to help you along the way and to help you decide and discover these best business apps for your business. Today we are talking to Peggy Emch from TimeSheets.com and we’ll get into timesheets in a minute, but first of all Peggy, aside from being Marketing Manager at TimeSheets, I have to mention this, she is also the founder of the Primal Parent which is a blog about paleo nutrition and being a parent with that lifestyle. I’m not going to evangelize about nutrition because that’s a very touchy subject, but if you’re curious about what it is, go check out the Primal Parent and Peggy also has a double degree in Math and Philosophy, making her brain really, really awesome. Peggy thank you for giving me a little bit of time. Any other bits of curious about yourself that you think people would find interesting?

Peggy Emch: Well, I’ve been snowboarding for almost twenty years.

Jimmy: It just keeps going! How did you end up getting in twenty years deep of snowboarding?

Peggy: Well I started skiing when I was four and all my friends started snowboarding so I tried it and I loved it and I can’t give it up.

Jimmy: That’s cool. I really like discovering these different personalities of people in all sorts of companies because you think what you know on face value is one thing and then you start digging deeper and you find people like yourself who are just multi-tasking and twenty years deep in snowboarding and it’s just pretty cool.

Peggy: At our company there’s a whole bunch of musicians. Several years ago, all of us were musicians. So that was kind of cool.

Jimmy: I saw that you’re a song writer. Do you also play an instrument?

Peggy: Yeah. I play the piano and I sing. I actually am just about to put out my first album. I’m way too old for my first album though.

Jimmy: You’re never too old for anything.

Peggy: Yeah, right.

Jimmy: First album, play the piano, song writer, double degree. It’s very cool.

Peggy: And two kids! I don’t have time for anything else.

Jimmy: You’ll likely manifest time out of some weird thing that you’re going to discover next.

Peggy: Yeah, right. My time comes from not watching TV.

Jimmy: I think that’s a big thing, right? I want to dive into a little bit about, everything about TimeSheets. For the listeners, kind of the format is we’re going to discover what TimeSheet is, TimeSheets.com what it is, what it does and a bunch of all the curious stuff around it and then we’re going to transition into what other tools are used internally at TimeSheets.com to better help them grow and manage and do a bunch of stuff that we’re going to discover together in a few minutes. So, to start, I guess my first question is I want to know…

What is the problem that TimeSheets.com solves for a person? What is that one thing, that one core thing that it helps someone do?

Peggy: Well I think that there’s probably two things because our software has a few different types to it. One is hourly time tracking so this is going to be for the employees that need to clock on so on that side what TimeSheets.com helps companies achieve is just to manage accurate time keeping and would eliminate the actual number of hours that employees work because when you’re writing it down with pencil and paper, you typically round so an employee gets in at 9:07 and they say they got in at 9:00. Even if an employer is willing to pay for those minutes, it’s still kind of nice to know when your employees are really coming and going. It helps for that and then the other side of our software is the project tracking and that is not so much for the employees, but for the customers. We’re tracking the time and work loads to bill.

Jimmy: So it’s project tracking on one hand and time tracking on the other.

Peggy: Yes.

Jimmy: Cool. Within those two core competencies, what are some success stories that kind of jump out to you from your own users, your own people that you guys are in contact with.

What are some of those things that they were able to do after signing up with TimeSheets that helped them to improve thier business?

Peggy: Well, there are a couple of things that I hear a lot about. One of those is just kind of peace of mind for a boss because they can see all of their employees clocked in from their own accounts online, so they don’t even really have to be in the office to see that. It gives them just this sense of peace. “All my employees are there and they’re working”. Our software also helps to ensure that the employees are in the office when they clocked in and that they are them by taking a photo. That’s actually optional, but if peace of mind is what you’re looking for … and then another thing that people talk a lot about is having last payroll thoughts because their employees do stop rounding, they stop buddy punching in for each other and stuff like that. They find that their payroll costs went down a bit.

Jimmy: That’s really curious. When does a company know that they’re at that size where this is a potential problem? What are the types of companies or businesses that you really see that take the most advantage of TimeSheets.com and what are some of the characteristics? What is their scale? How many employees do they tend to have? Also, what are some problems that a person could kind of, for example, take me. Say I had a company with “x” number of employees. What are some of the things I’m going to encounter that are triggers for me to say “I need a time tracking solution”?

Peggy: Well I think one of, you said a lot.

Jimmy: Let’s start off with…

What are the types of companies that are most appropriate to use a solution like TimeSheets.com? What are some of those companies?

Peggy: One of the things that’s pretty interesting about a time tracking company in general is that almost everybody needs them. What’s really cool is that we do not have an average customer. We have everyone. There’s like no kind of company that we don’t see in our list of companies. I can’t tell you that we really accommodate to mostly insurance agents or doctors or bookkeepers, because there’s also trucking companies and just all kinds of companies that you’ve never heard of like cooking companies and

Jimmy: Let’s do one thing. Give me let’s say three or four different companies in completely different businesses and markets that use TimeSheets.com so what I want the people listening to understand is we can’t run through every single example, but it would be cool if we could run through at least three or four that might trigger at least like peripheral inspiration to a whole bunch of other people to just understand where

Peggy: Okay, we’ve got, I’m not looking at saying names because I don’t know how she’ll feel about us mentioning her on our podcast, but we have one fashion company and they’re about 400-450 employees and just constantly growing so we’re always adding more. They have a lot of departments and they’re even set out in different areas so for them, it’s really useful to assign lots of different supervisors and all of those supervisors have employees under them and then all of those supervisors are able to run reports and so I think for a really big company our service helps them to just bring all the time tracking together in one place and everybody can kind of communicate about it, they can all see it. It’s obvious for all of the people that are set up to review it together. We also have a lot of StateFarm agents for example. StateFarm, those offices are usually pretty small. It could be anywhere from 2 but probably our average StateFarm customer is like 2-5 employees. Really tiny little offices. They like it because they don’t have supervisors. The StateFarm agent is the one who does everything in general. They just want to make sure that their employees are recording active time and that’s like their main thing. They don’t want rounding, they want to make sure that their employees are not working overtime so they log in all the time. They like to check to make sure that the employees aren’t working more than 40 hours a week because they’re on a tight budget and they don’t want to pay for that. That’s a few of our different companies.

Jimmy: For example…

How does your pricing model adjust to someone with 2-3 employees to someone with 400+?

Peggy: Well, our pricing starts out basically $9 a user and it goes in increments of 2 users so our cheapest, no sorry. Nine dollars per two users so our cheapest is $9 and you get two employees with that and it goes up like that $9 every two users for awhile. I’m not sure, it might be around 35 or 25 that it gets even more discounted so the more employees you have the more discount you get.

Jimmy: When somebody decides to start using TimeSheets.com, a lot of times it’s also important for these apps to integrate with other stuff.

What time tracking integrations do you have that are most important for the average user? What do they allow the user to do?

Peggy: Our most important integration is with QuickBooks because that’s generally what so many people use and our integration we created in house and it’s just a little software program that you install to your QuickBooks.

Jimmy: Let’s assume that people don’t know. Explain to me, let’s say I use QuickBooks and now I use TimeSheets. What is it that TimeSheets allows me to do within QuickBook?

Peggy: It allows you to upload your hourly time and the project data and we also do expenses, which I didn’t mention. It’s kind of a side software and you can also upload all of your expense accounts.

Jimmy: So everything that relates to expenses, to time will automatically be pulled in?

Peggy: Yeah. It just takes a few seconds for that to happen.

Jimmy: Okay. Over the evolution of TimeSheets.com as a company and growing, how have you seen since you’ve been there with the company that its grown, evolved, maybe changed a little bit, adapted to specific needs?

What are those specific things that you’ve seen over the evolution of TimeSheets?

Peggy: Not relating to QuickBooks or just in general?

Jimmy: Just as growth.

Peggy: Wow, a whole lot. Five years ago when I started the company, we had an older version of the QuickBook integration, which didn’t do anything with expenses. Obviously we’ve improved so many features over the years. We’re actually just getting ready to do a release in the next week or two. It’s going to add scheduling and GPS tracking and a couple of times a year we do huge, huge updates.

Jimmy: From what you can give us, what is going to involve this scheduling feature? I use some scheduling software and I’d be curious what the take is on scheduling with TimeSheets.

Peggy: We would be curious to hear your opinion! Our scheduling is cool. It’s nice, you can drag and drop schedules and that kind of thing. It’s like modern. We’re not really sure how well people are going to take it so we’re going to release it on a soft basis so anyone who wants to give it a try, we’ll turn it on and take feedback. “This isn’t something that TimeSheets usually does”. Usually we release something that’s great and we know it, but the scheduling we really want to get some feedback on this.

Jimmy: That’s really good to hear because I think a lot of times you might find yourself throwing features at people. What is this relationship with your user base as far as the options they have to reach out to TimeSheets.com whenever they have problems?

What are the customer service options a user has with TimeSheets.com?

Peggy: They can always call our customer service and we’re here all day Pacific time. They can email anytime and we also have a blog. We’ve seen a lot of comments on certain posts and we have an announcement system so when we do an update, we will announce to it everyone. We also have a really tight relationship with many of our customers so there are a lot of customers we already know we’re going to offer the scheduling to. People we just talk to all the time.

Jimmy: So now I guess one of the last things I want to touch on relating directly to TimeSheets is in your opinion, what makes the TimeSheets.com team amazing? I think that a lot of times the team is a little forgotten in place of the tool, but it’s people like you and the team that actually give things life.

What is it about the team that in your opinion makes it great?

Peggy: Well, the team is why I work here. When I started, there were three or four of us. We were all super geeky, we were all musicians and into math and geeky stuff like that. We all got along and then from there as we needed to hire people, we would hire our friends. “Hey, do you know anybody?” and that’s the way we do it. One of our employees is actually my husband’s best friend from when he was fifteen and it’s just we are family and we just like each other.

Jimmy: That’s cool. That’s very interesting. So, you hire people that you know. I guess that kind of goes against the grain of the popular “don’t work with people that you know” or “don’t work with or hire friends”, etc.

Peggy: It works for us. It works. We’re cool.

Jimmy: That’s really good to hear.

Peggy: We have like zero turnover. The first three guys were working together for almost probably more than ten years.

How long has TimeSheets.com been around?

Peggy: Well TimeSheets has been around ten years this year, we started in 2004, but before that the three original guys were doing a web design business. They started creating the software because they needed it and then that turned out to be

Jimmy: I think a lot of people have that same story. You’ve just had a ten year anniversary this year. What did you guys do?

Peggy: Well, we have been working on completely revamping our website, which we were planning on releasing months ago, but it’s looking like it’s probably going to be December, but at least we know we can get it out this year.

Jimmy: I think that’s a pretty good goal to have for the tenth anniversary. That’s cool.

Peggy: Yeah, we’re all really excited.

Jimmy: So shifting over a little bit, now we’re going to start getting into the tools in general that you guys use internally and the first question is what are some of the more premium applications that TimeSheets.com is using internally, so beyond the gmail and beyond this…

What are some of the apps that you guys are actually paying for and that you find value in to help you run a better business?

Peggy: I tried to make a list. I actually remembered. We use a bunch of things. We use Trillian for a chat.

Jimmy: Trillian?

Peggy: Trillian, it’s called.

Jimmy: How do you spell that?

Peggy: T-r-i-l-l-i-a-n.

Jimmy: Trillian, okay.

Trillian, that’s what we use to chat with each other.

Peggy: And that’s what we use to chat with each other. A lot of us are remote employees, that’s what happens I guess when you hire friends. So we use that. We’ve been thinking about or actually one of our employees suggested something new. It’s called “Slack”. Have you ever heard of that?

Jimmy: Yeah, actually I have because I am part of a MeetUp group that is very techie and geeky and to stay in touch in between meet ups, the guy who organizes it suggested Slack so now we have this group on Slack where we’re sharing links and a whole bunch of stuff. Actually, I think it’s pretty neat. The iPhone app works really well.

Hootsuite for marketing stuff and Joined.me for online meetings.

Peggy: We’re going to be looking into that. Well, I’m going to be looking into that. So that’s that. I use Hootsuite for marketing stuff. We use Joined.me to do like online meetings. It’s like GoToMeeting, except it’s simpler so we use that to help each other. When I can’t find something that’s on my computer someone will just jump on and find it for me so that’s great. We also use it with out customers. We’ll use it with online demos with screen sharing.

Jimmy: Oh, that’s very cool. That’s very cool.

Peggy: Yeah and that’s pretty cool.

Jimmy: I just want to add a note to the listeners that the links and everything that we’ll be talking about or will be mentioned I am going to whenever this gets published, put it all on a page in the show notes and so on and so forth. You can jump over to GetApp and everything will be there as a side bar for you. From the tools that you use, what has been the one that has solved the biggest problem? Like if you were to eliminate this tool, it would really, really hurt.

Wikispaces is where all of our engineers keep their notes and drafts.

Peggy: The one then that I have I haven’t mentioned yet would be that one and that’s WikiSpaces.

Jimmy: WikiSpaces?

Peggy: Right, which we’ve been thinking about like moving from WikiSpaces over to ~~OneNote~~ Evernote, but we haven’t done it yet. Anyway, WikiSpaces is where all of our engineers keep all of their notes and all of their drafts and since we deal with overtime, there are like some really sticky calculations and they have all these charts describing how overtime works for the different states and different scenarios and all these things. All of that is stored in WikiSpaces for us and then we have procedure and protocol documents.

Jimmy: One question about that. Okay, what are kind of a couple of reasons that would call this switch over to ~~OneNote~~Evernote?

Peggy: Okay, well, we used to not even use WikiSpaces. Everything just used to be kind of like everyone has their own notes here and there and it was just nobody was really sharing anything so we started using WikiSpaces to start sharing, but what we’re finding is that WikiSpaces is not like user friendly like ~~OneNote~~ Evernote. I mean with ~~OneNote~~ Evernote you can drag your stuff and put it here or take something off a web page and throw it on there and WikiSpaces doesn’t work that way. It’s more old school. So that’s why we’re thinking – you can easily sort images, upload the image and do all these things so ~~OneNote~~ Evernote just looks like it might be a little bit more convenient and modern.

Jimmy: It’s curious how just interacting with an application is something that is so fundamental and I think it’s something that, I don’t know if I’m on the right track here, but I think Apple is a little to thank for this because of this very conscious decision making around why something has to be there. What is this natural movement of flow that users are going to go through. What’s going to make life easier? It’s curious that you can have your whole life on WikiSpaces, but if merging over is actually an idea and a consideration because of its usability.

Peggy: Exactly. It makes a difference. We are so busy and every one of us that works here have a lot of jobs to do. We’re a pretty small company and we really need that efficiency.

Jimmy: So how bit is TimeSheets.com right now? How many people?

Peggy: There’s about fifteen of us.

Jimmy: Okay, fifteen of you managing companies that have hundreds of employees. That’s pretty cool, right?

Peggy: Yes and that’s only recently. We started out even smaller than that. I’ve been with the company for five years so I wear a whole lot of hats. We all do.

Jimmy: So from your own day to day, what are some of the tools that you use free or not free that really make your day go around?

WordPress is where I do all out blogging.

Peggy: Well I write blogs so I use WordPress.

Jimmy: Okay and are you writing directly in WordPress or are you writing in another editor? What’s your work flow with this?

Dropbox is where I keep some of my files.

Peggy: I write in WordPress and I used to as I come up with ideas for posts I would keep them in some file on DropBox or something. Of course I use DropBox too. Then I stopped doing that so what I do now is within WordPress I keep all of my ideas as drops. It works really well for me, even if the drop is just the title.

Jimmy: Do you ever find that you’re writing and have you ever had the problem of losing – either your internet dropped or something like that and your file didn’t save or something along those lines?

Peggy: This has happened a couple of times both writing a blog for TimeSheets and the Primal Parent and it’s pretty depressing and for that reason one might you know start writing elsewhere, but I won’t. I continue writing within WordPress because I think it’s most convenient, but I’ve gotten a lot better over the years at clicking save draft a lot.

Jimmy: So, aside from WordPress, do you use any premium paid applications on your day to day? I don’t mean to personally manage your workload.

Peggy: I mentioned Hootsuite, I can’t think of anything else I use right now.

Jimmy: For example, what’s your kind of process on generating those content ideas and do you use any tools for research or is it something that you just interact with with your customers? How is that?

Peggy: Well, there’s a lot of avenues I guess. I’m in a few LinkedIn groups, especially employment law kind of things because that’s one of the things I write a lot about so with that, I just subscribe to certain newsletters and stuff to learn and come up with different ideas and stuff and I think that the blog is about, it’s got a lot of employment law and wage and hours stuff and employee communications and that kind of thing, so coming up with ideas for the blog and I’ve been writing it for five full years now, so I don’t know how I manage it all. It just really comes from just paying attention to what’s going on in the news.

Jimmy: Transitioning now into this last question about the tools that you guys are using as a team and as an individual, are there any recurring annoyances that you still haven’t found the right tool to solve it or something where you feel that something could be improved besides the WikiSpaces usability thing?

Peggy: Yes.

Jimmy: What? Tell me.

VoIP is a nagging issue.

Peggy: There definitely is and in fact, there’s even a blog post a few weeks ago on that topic. Our phone system. We have been using, we use a lot of different types of voice over IP and none of them have really proved to … really the most frustrating thing for our company. I think that is it.

Jimmy: Okay, so explain to me some specific, as specific as you can because I know a lot of times it’s something completely here in the moment and you don’t remember it, but some specific problem with your VOIP.

Peggy: Okay, well one of them is that if we have just a slight lull in the internet connection then we start to sound digital and that’s horrible. We’ve tried to combat that with different things, but it seems that no matter what we try we run into another problem so we started using Skype in addition and Skype just doesn’t direct all the calls. Let’s say that we have five people on Skype and they’re all listening for calls. Four of them are going to get it and one of them won’t.

Jimmy: That’s weird.

Peggy: Yeah and this is so annoying, so annoying. We’re just constantly trying to problem solve with our phone problem.

Jimmy: So one of the primary issues then is when the connection lags a little bit the robotic sound and some dropped calls? Something like that?

Peggy: Yes, their independent of each other so if we weren’t using Skype then we could have our phone system forward to all of our like computer phones, no problem, but we have this terrible sound issue. Well, when we use Skype we really don’t have the sound issue, but we don’t get all the calls. People come up with all these different things. “Why don’t you just get a certain type of phone and have your internet connection like partitioned” or something like that. I don’t really understand how it works. My husband is Colombian and his old friend from when he was fifteen is also Colombian so we’ve got an employee from Columbia and we can’t exactly use her land-line. She’s not making calls to Columbia because that would be cost prohibitive so we’ve got to deal with this situation with remote employees and I don’t know. I think it’s a little different than people who just have everybody in the office.

Jimmy: So on average, how large are the group calls that you’re making and how simultaneous are they running? So like five group calls at a time on the same line or one group call or how is this going?

Peggy: I don’t understand the question.

Jimmy: There’s fifteen of you? Is the usual thing to have like one group call with five people consuming the one internet connection or is it like simultaneous group calls all running at the same time?

Peggy: No, I wasn’t really talking about group calls. More of just our phone system will forward them to everyone…Maybe like four people or something are accepting phone calls one of them won’t get it. You ask them “did you hear the phone” and they’re like “nope, didn’t ring here”.

Jimmy: Oh, I got you now. So the calls are forwarding to everybody theoretically, but occasionally one person won’t get it and then there’s a possibility that a person who should answer the phone isn’t getting the call?

Peggy: Yeah, exactly. And if everyone else is busy and that person doesn’t hear it, we have a problem. This is not a good thing because we get a lot of phone calls throughout the day. We have a lot of customers and to think we’ve been around for as long as we have and we still have a phone problem.

Jimmy: I think one of the ideas that I’m going to see if we can do pretty soon is launch this question, this problem to several of our vendors on GetApp and see the solutions that they have. I’m pretty sure that they’re all going to say our solution is the solution, but at least it will be interesting to get their take on it at least as to why it’s happening and then if or how they could help. It would be interesting to get their take on it.

Peggy: Yeah, I definitely agree. I wrote a blog post about it and several different companies commented on it and I’m not totally sure that their solution is quite right for us because I’m not sure if they understood that we have employees out of the country too.

Jimmy: Well, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. I think that this is the end. It was a good call. I had fun. I don’t know about you. I hope you enjoyed it.

Peggy: I did! It was fun!

Jimmy: Is there anything that you would like the listeners to know about TimeSheets.com before we say goodbye?

Peggy: We’d love to give you a free demo any time using Join.me.

Jimmy: So just go to TimeSheets.com and sign up for a free demo and give it a go.

Peggy: Yeah, give it a whirl and we’re always happy to extend our demos to a length that is more accommodating for customers.

Jimmy: Okay, cool. That sounds great and on my end, I just want to say thank you Peggy for the time. It’s been fun and again go check out TimeSheets.com and give them a spin to see if they’re the right solution for your company, but as we saw, they really adapt to companies from 2-450 employees so I’m pretty sure that most of you will fall somewhere in there and go check out GetApp.com for one reason and that is to leave a review for TimeSheets.com and if you use TimeSheets.com and you think it’s great, this is one of the things that you can do to give them a big thanks and that’s going over to GetApp.com and leaving a review. Those reviews help the vendors really rank higher on search results because it adds value to the vendor so if you’re a TimeSheets.com user, go leave a review and it will help TimeSheets.com a lot. On my end, thanks a lot for listening. If you have any questions, feel free to write in to GetApp. You can reach me at Jimmy.Flores@GetApp.com and go check us out if you’re looking for any business applications and even if you’re not in the market for new business apps and you just want to discover new ones or alternatives to the ones you have as just curiosity, just jump over and give our data base a whirl. So, with that being said again, thank you Peggy. Check out TimeSheets.com and check out GetApp.com and that’s pretty much it. I hope everybody enjoyed it. Have a good one. Bye!

The post GetCast 1: TimeSheets.com and the apps they use to grow their business. appeared first on GetApp Learning Center.