Home
Contact Us
Site Map
Features & Benefits
Frequently asked questionsBuzz
About our company
TimeFiler appears to be a fairly small company. What does that mean for us, and what is the risk of us dealing with you compared to a large company?
Yes, we are a small company and we think this is ideal for our product goals, and for our customers.
It is definitely not unusual for the new generation of web 2.0 products coming out. We’ve all worked for large companies in the past, and while there is the appearance of security in that, a large company is effectively just a collection of smaller companies, in which things often just come down to a small number of key individuals in any case. At the end of the day it is the quality, experience and commitment of the people that matter, and this puts customers into risky territory if these aren’t up to scratch regardless of the size of organisation.
We also don’t have the barriers in place that some larger companies in our market do that in reality just make it harder to listen to customers, and then do something about it that makes them happy.
So we are small but we are extremely nimble, and we like it that way. And our customers like the level of influence they have with the growth of a product that typically affects every single person in their organization. As our customer base continues to grow we will strive to make sure that this environment remains.
- What are your expansion plans? Do you have big goals to take over the world of time management?
We don’t think for one moment that TimeFiler is suited to all customers, and regions around the world. And we can’t afford to take on customers that won’t be able to make the most of the functionality that TimeFiler has to offer and sing our praises.
So the world is a big place, and that is true of Time Management as well. There is room for a variety of solutions, and it is a matter of playing our part in helping customers find the solution that will work for them. We think TimeFiler will work for many more customers than one would think of an ordinary ‘timesheet system’ though.
We do expect however to move into more and more geographic regions. This will be mostly led by marketing strategy rather than product resourcing as TimeFiler can already cope with clients from different regions, and this has always been the case since our first client who is spread amongst 13 countries in the Asia Pacific region.
In general we want to remain a relatively small, yet highly nimble company that doesn’t get distracted on other things as our customer base increases. This will bring success to us, and of course our valued customers.
- Are you planning on developing other modules, for example, Payroll?
We’ve thought about it, but we keep coming back to the belief that TimeFiler already solves difficult enough problems for organisations that are worth paying money to solve, and it is something we want to stay focused on, refining our existing functionality through the years, and moving it to better and brighter technologies as the next big technology comes through (as they always do). And we want to communicate what we do with a larger number of potential customers. None of this will happen if we are trying to get the product to take on more and more topics that that are usually well served in each region anyway.
So we are working and will continue to work with partners in providing near seamless integration, and this will involve payroll, as well as accounting and other ERP providers.
- What is your product release strategy?
TimeFiler is being actively developed and improved. We aim to have at least two major releases a year. All version updates are deployed as installs, and the TimeFiler application is responsible for upgrading the database automatically.
If you are using the hosted option, then upgrades are done for you.
- What is your development path and roadmap for the medium term?
Mostly our development path is about staying within the bounds of Time Management software but doing an incredible job of it.
During 2008/9 we will continue to improve the existing functionality. We also want to improve the amount of configuration that can be done within the TimeFiler web application itself.
Presently much of the application is configured using our TimeFiler Studio tool. This is a tool purely for configuration, for example new reports, or interfaces, and different dashboards layouts, custom fields or new business rules. It is very much a design tool like Microsoft Visual Studio is a design tool.
Whilst this is great because it allows all our functionality to be configured without developers, it has always been our design goal to have all functionality within the web application including configuration functionality.
We also wish to continue focusing on performance, speed, web usability, and scalability. All topics that don’t always get the attention they deserve in the quest to add more and more flash features, but nevertheless are things that make a huge difference to customers and drive their happiness.
Lastly we are expecting to have a full Unicode version of TimeFiler ready by the end of 2008. This will greatly assist with expansion into other regions and markets. A native 64-bit version is being considered for 2008 as well.
- Are you able to offer assistance with our other software products?
We certainly have enough experience to work with any payroll or accounting provider in order to ensure there is there near seamless integration with TimeFiler. This is a common need.
- What is your understanding of the term “Web 2.0”?
It’s a term that has different usages (social networking etc) but in a business sense, Web 2.0 is about a small team of highly experienced people who are passionate about a certain topic. They develop a product that tries to meet that need in the simplest way possible using the latest web concepts that make the product extremely responsive in a way that wasn’t achievable with the web before.
It is also about customers being given the tools to quickly grasp what the product is about, whether it is for them, and what it is trying to achieve without having to go through lengthy ‘getting to know you’ cycles before the customer feels comfortable moving forward.
The product also doesn’t feel the need to keep branching out into diverse areas and solve every problem under the sun trying to be everything to everyone. It unashamedly knows where its' strengths are and sticks to them, continually improving the areas it knows it was created for. Yet it integrates well with other products removing the myth that you must have everything out of the same box in order to achieve integration.
The product
- If our company has a lot of configuration because we have complex rules and layouts, will this end up being a nightmare whenever we get new versions?
Definitely not. Customers and Consultants helping to configure your rules and layouts never have to touch, or know about web concepts like html, javascript, and css. And when there is a new version, there isn’t an octopus-like tangle of web files to change that has been customised just for you. Although there are huge differences in how TimeFiler is used between customers, these are all soft settings that a Time Management consultant, and the customer configure.
Our development processes also stress backwards compatibility in terms of options that exist in the system.
- Explain to me why I should avoid getting my own development resource to write a simple timesheet product for our own internal use. My developers say it will be easy to do. Is it?
There is no question that timesheeting feels like something that should be simple to develop because it should be simple to use. Unfortunately sometimes the simpler something needs to be, the more work that has to go into it, and nowhere is this more true that in time management software.
Prior to Enfinit, we’d seen numerous attempts at creating ‘simple timesheet software’. They all got unstuck because they were treated much like some other bread and butter issue on a developers task list. So we decided if we were serious about a new breed of time management, then we were going to have to expect to write a lot of code.
The core of the timesheet and time management is the time entry area. Most likely, you’ll want to use it for almost all employees in your company. If it’s great to use, employees are happy. If it totally sucks, you are no longer creating employee happiness. And if it’s 2x, 4x, 10x harder to use than something else, then it is costing your business dearly, and the cost to develop it internally is likely to be the tiniest of the extra costs to the business.
We could talk about this topic forever. So we did. Read it here.
- Why do you guys think your Business Rule Engine is so good? You mustn’t be the only ones to do this?
We doubt that there is a single concept in our business rule engine that hasn’t been figured out by many vendors in the past. There are probably a dozen or concepts in our business rules engine like that. However it is all to do with balance and how these are blended together that make things special.
The back end of our business rules engine is based around scripting, and its basic constructs are based around a subset of the VBA language (Visual Basic for Applications). Most consultants and expert employees of our customers already understand this language perfectly well. We’ve made this very specific to Time Management though, and in the process stripped out a pile of things that we don’t think will ever be needed and just clutter things up.
We want the business rule scripting language to just be the glue that binds things together, and offers a lot of flexibility, but we’ve deliberately avoided trying to over do the choices that end up making one feel like ‘they are doing development’. This is definitely NOT a developer’s tool (and this is meant in a totally positive way). It is for business savvy people who wish to configure business rules for customers which is another set of expertise altogether. So as examples, we don’t even allow iteration concepts like ‘while’ and ‘for’ loops. Technically this is easily achievable, but our belief is that if a consultant has to worry about that sort of stuff, we hadn’t offered rich enough business rule functions.
Read more about our thoughts on the business rules engine here.
- What has made TimeFiler a responsive/usable Time Management product? Are there any development secrets to be found?!
Yes we do have a ‘silver bullet’ for getting useful functionality into the product:
- Hard work. A lot of it.
- Listening carefully to customers, and ensuring there are a tiny number of layers (ie no more than one) between the customer and development of it
- Making sure our company is about the customer, and solving key problems that we know we can solve. Everything else in our company is hugely unimportant.
- Taking a step back from the Time Management market for a couple of years, and thinking about it all again in a new light after ones institutional knowledge of the subject has long been forgotten. There are a lot of old ideas in this market. It has been very useful to take a step back, effectively throw those ideas in the trash, and then build up a product again from very basic principles.
This represents the core of why TimeFiler is the way it is. There are some development ‘secrets’ that we have exploited however.
These mostly consist of exploiting the only recent Ajax web concepts which have added a considerable amount of responsiveness and interaction to web front ends that really suit time management and make other web products, and certainly Windows solutions look distinctly from another age.
We also have a great business rule engine as well, and some fresh thinking has definitely paid off. There is no single secret in here though. Mostly it is about a dozen or so smaller concepts seamlessly working together.
Then there is the interaction and interplay between a responsive web front end, and business rules. We call it ‘flying numbers’, where you type in something and get immediate feedback about their entire pay, and validation warnings.
We’ve also 100% embraced standards like Microsoft SQL Server, and for reporting, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services which are standards that our customers tend to have very strong opinions on (for good reason).
- TimeFiler is going to be used by everyone in the company. Given this can we use TimeFiler for anything other than time management?
TimeFiler is mainly about smart time management, and is likely to be used across an organisation and touched by all employees. TimeFiler also needs to understand the organisational hierarchy in order to correctly determine which employees are allowed to see other employees in order to approve/decline timesheets and requests.
There is a natural ebb and flow with time management which means that TimeFiler will be one of the most regularly used web applications in the organisation. Consequently we can understand that that some companies may want show other related information, rather than have to supply employees with other web applications to achieve the same thing which they might not use so regularly.
TimeFiler has a fantastic ability to be able to customise new and existing dashboards with other fields from other systems that can come across as customisable fields via the one click synchronisation process. We’re not saying that TimeFiler can be used to replace a specialist training management or accident recording system, but there may be extra fields you may wish to record, particularly against the employee, jobs, or clients, that you just want shown to employees and managers.
We have also put a lot of effort into allowing our reporting framework to integrate with other databases such as your billing, CRM, payroll or HR system. At its core, TimeFiler uses Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) as the report engine.
SSRS is a fantastic reporting tool. However out of the box, we’ve felt it is a quite involved process writing various reports, and then deploying them in such a way that people can only see who they are entitled to.
Since TimeFiler already needs to know which employees can see which employees and areas of the business, we’ve felt that it will make sense for many companies to tie into that and deploy their employee centric reports just once, knowing that security will be properly applied for each user logging in, without having to go through the fuss of configuring SSRS security for every employee in the company.
We also believe that SSRS is great at rendering reports, but that TimeFiler can do a better job of capturing the parameters of the report within TimeFiler and its web/Ajax framework. Plus we’ve also noticed a few cross-browser issues with SSRS when it comes to presenting the report that we have corrected along the way.
In short, SSRS has become the deserving standard in the reporting market, and is a fantastic tool, but it is not without its rough edges, particularly when it comes to deployment and security. And that is an area we believe TimeFiler can smooth out for some companies who want to, or are already using TimeFiler anyway.
Our clients
- Which kind of client is likely to benefit most by using TimeFiler?
As we have mentioned in TimeFiler in a class of its own, the world is a big place, and that goes for Time Management products as well. We’ve listed in that link the spectrum as we understand it, and where we fit.
Generally we believe TimeFiler works best when there are complicated payments, or validation conditions on your various employees, and you want all of these to be sorted out smoothly, entering information as efficiently as possible at the source, and making sure that everything that goes to the manager, and payroll/accounting has been accepted by the employee and manager as valid. Ownership for accuracy is well and truly moved to the source.
Also if you have a large number of employees, and care about how much time they are actually spend inputting timesheet related information currently. Efficiency of input makes a huge difference over a large number of employees, and that cost can add up. And we aren’t talking about efficiency differences between an online solution like ours and paper or Excel; we are talking about huge differences also between online solutions. For some the differences will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range in terms of lost time and lack of enthusiasm for what is a very critical process.
- My company is extremely risk-adverse. How can we test everything without involving all employees? How can TimeFiler help manage this risk and cost?
Managing time across your organisation will directly affect everyone in the company. So it makes sense that this is a decision to be extremely careful and even paranoid about. Yet there are wide differences in the products out there, and their chance of success in meeting your requirements. And unfortunately for most of the products out there, you won’t know the full impact until you have passed the point of no return (and usually paid most of the money to the software provider).
This really goes against the grain of what TimeFiler is about.
Firstly we are trying to put as much useful information about our product on our website. We are striving to be as transparent as possible about what our product does, and how it does it, and even pointing out where there might not be a fit. We just can’t afford to have customers who aren’t going to be completely and utterly happy with TimeFiler.
So we want you to know where TimeFiler has been designed to be strong in, and quickly decide whether it will fit well within your organisation. We also want to provide some level of opinion about what the Time Management market actually is, and the different segments. We’ve found this to be useful because often terminology like “Time & Attendance” makes people go down a certain track in their search, but if there can be more of a bird’s eye view, then other possibilities can be thought about and light shed on a big decision.
We’ve also decided to focus on the fundamentals of the product, and be upfront about what customers can expect to get when dealing with us. This has meant that we have much happier customers, and if you want to talk to any of them, that is fine by us! We’re not going to steer you towards a small number of customers that have been carefully coached to say the right things. That would be very anti "Web 2.0"!
For the most paranoid medium-large companies, we are only too happy to kick off small pilots that show-case all the functionality that will be in a full rollout that is completely geared toward your organisation. These pilots are extremely cost effective, and make the rollout a breeze. And if out of the pilot phase there is something TimeFiler needs to do that it doesn’t currently do, then provided it is something that makes business sense to be in the product, we will most often than not build it into TimeFiler in a way that all users can benefit from it (and we don’t charge for that kind of improvement either).
 Third party product integration |
Try TimeFiler now
Enquire now