For Immediate Release
Sierra Corporation Announces Public Release of Time Recording Productivity Software, TIMETRACKER™
Honolulu, HI., June. 10th, 2007 – Sierra Corporation, an Information Technology solutions provider, announced today the public release of their in-house time recording software, TIMETRACKER.
“At Sierra Corporation, we offer only the best products to our customers, and are extremely pleased to announce the first public release of our TIMETRACKER software,” said Rassul B. Hashemi, President, Sierra Corporation. “TIMETRACKER succeeds in being a lightweight, exceptionally easy to use time, job, and petty cash records keeping package.”
Sierra Corporation drew on the extensive academic field of human-computer interaction research when designing TIMETRACKER, organizing its menus and user interface to be both intuitive and fast.
The core of TIMETRACKER's functionality is the datagrid. Sierra developed a custom "smart" algorithm that gives customers advanced analysis at a glance, without having to waste time running reports. For instance sorting by client allows Administrators to see right away who their top customers for the last month were. Similarly, sorting by user instantly shows who is doing the most work, organized in two week increments. The sorting works in conjunction with several context-sensitive Filters and Search, so you can begin to ask some really complex questions and immediately get a visual answer, with zero effort.
Integrated live Excel export lets users export whatever they see to Excel, effectively turning every page into a "Reports" generator.
The software uses AJAX in many places where it's appropriate. Here we have a modal window for time entry, rather than having to go to a whole new screen. It's a small change, but it's hugely beneficial for working quickly, because users are able to keep the context in which they're working. The time entry window has several efficiency features as well. The work start time defaults to the current date and time. When you type in billable and non-billable time, the end time then automatically adjusts itself for you.
Many of the text boxes in the system include an integrated spell-check. The spell-checker uses a shared dictionary between employees, so anyone can "Add to Dictionary" for names, customers, etc. Client and project boxes also have an integrated type-ahead feature. This has two uses. You can easily check whether a particular customer is already in the list, or for common projects, like "updates", instead of typing the whole word a user just has to type "u". All of this combines to keep the context of where users are working, so they can run at maximum efficiency.
"Commonly with other systems we found people running into a situation where they did some work, but Accounting hadn't received their billing info yet, or an Account Manager hadn't gotten the customer's contact info, so you'd end up having to run around to three departments just to record time for work you already did." Says Rich Keating, Application Developer for Sierra Corporation and developer of TIMETRACKER.
"Automatic E-Mail updates for new and modified jobs allow employees to stay up to date via BlackBerry, even when they are out in the field. Employees also get automatic E-Mails for recurring and overdue jobs, which virtually eliminates the kind of unfulfilling clerical work typically handled by teams of office staff. "
Anyone who enters time can add clients and projects on the fly, right in the time entry window. The system also doesn't impose any limits on the amount of nesting you can do, so it can grow to accommodate projects of any scope or complexity. TIMETRACKER is designed to do a single task well without trying to take over your company's pipeline. Clean, formatted data can be exported to Excel for further manipulation, or import into other packages.
Petty Cash works on the idea of a cash box, so anyone can add or remove cash. You have all the benefits of the data grid for sorting and filtering. Additionally at the top of the screen is a summary of current funds, so as the day goes by, when people are going in and out of the office and buying things for clients, you can see at a glance how much money is in the box.
The system can also handle negative numbers, for instance when an employee spends their own money on a piece of equipment, you can see how that expense will affect your bottom line. Each section has a description of what that numbers mean, so anyone can look at Petty Cash and actually understand where the money is going. This is in keeping with Sierra Corporation's design philosophy that software should be simple enough for anyone to start using it right away, without having to read a big fat manual first.
Petty Cash also has buttons for exporting an employee's expenses, or everyone's expenses to Excel for use in your accounting package. Full import/export for Quickbooks will be announced very soon.
TIMETRACKER is available as a live-demo on Sierra Corporation's website, at http://www.sierracorporation.com/ttdemo/
Please Contact Us for pricing.
About Sierra Corporation
Sierra Corporation has been offering a vast range of Information Technology solutions to large and small business enterprises, nonprofit organizations, and individuals since 1998, including everything from creating and maintaining networks to Web application development, hardware/software sales and services. We provide our clients with strategic and analytic services together with planning, design and implementation. We are there when you need us for all of your IT needs.
