XU: I am joined by Joe Daee, Vice President of Partnerships at eBillity. Joe’s role is to help solve client’s issues through technology and oversee implementation of strategy to secure revenue and growth for eBillity’s clients. First of all, tell our readers a little bit about your product Time Tracker, when and where did it all start and who does your product service?

JD: Time Tracker started in 2009 in New Jersey by Douglas Dweck, COO and Co-Founder and Murray Hidary, Co-Founder – they’re childhood friends who grew up together in Brooklyn. They both started businesses in their early twenties where they spent their fair share of time doing manual tracking of employee hours, hunting down employees for timesheets, and trying to answer the simple question: ​What did my employees spend their time doing this week? And that is how Time Tracker was born – an easy to use app for business owners to track time for payroll, invoicing and productivity.‍

XU: I can see how Time Tracker would benefit a bigger company where there are a large number of employees to each manager, but what about smaller companies, or those who are self-employed?

JD: Smaller organizations are always looking for ways to streamline their business so they can improve profitability and serve their customers in a meaningful way.  Time Tracker is a flexible software platform that allows them to create a straight line from accounting to time and expense to billing while allowing data movement to many of their other tools.

XU: Apart from tracking time spent on projects, how does Time Tracker help with profitability?

JD: Time tracking spent on clients, projects and tasks allows companies to look closely at productivity and profitability such as the amount of time spent on projects, dollars spent on employees and contractors, and how much was billed to the customer for that project.  This is all part of job costing.  

Our reporting allows the customer to take a deep dive into these financial elements to see where they were profitable and how to properly bill future projects so they ensure a reasonable profit margin on that work. - Joe Daee, Vice President of Partnerships, eBility

XU: Time Tracker is a well-known app in the US with the QuickBooks audience, I can see you’re a ​‘Top Rated’​ App and ​“Pro-Advisors Pick,”  ​how are you finding it in the global market with Xero?

JD: We first partnered with Xero in 2013 specifically for the Australian and New Zealand markets, we focused on time and expense tracking for invoicing with the ability to create invoices in Time Tracker and sync with Xero. By 2016 we expanded our reach and entered into the European and UK markets, and then moved our focus back to the US where we partnered with Xero to roll out payroll features one state at a time. Now in 2018, we integrate with Xero payroll and accounting in the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US.

XU: You mentioned Xero Payroll in the US, I am sure you’re aware of their recent partnership with Gusto, did that have much of an impact on Time Tracker?

JD: Yes, we did hear about the Xero and Gusto partnership back in August and it was pleasing news for us. Time Tracker has integrated with Gusto for a few years now and we have many customers already integrating with Time Tracker. We’re now working with our US Xero payroll customers to help them transition and reconnect their accounts with the new configuration.

XU: While we’re on the topic of payroll, I’ve heard rumours that Time Tracker is in the middle of diversifying their offering. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

JD: Our new customers started asking for features that allowed their employees to track time in a way that could be used for payroll – breaks, overtime, double time, things like that. But our older customers still wanted to see features that continued to improve time tracking for billing. So there we were split down the middle and needing to take action. So that’s exactly what we did – we split our development team down the middle and assigned one with the task of developing new features for payroll and the other to continue to roll out new features for billing.

XU: So how’s that working out?

JD: Surprisingly well, the team adjusted nicely and have shipped several features this year – geolocation tracking and automated invoice collection (add-on) for our invoicing customers and for payroll we now have clock-in, clock-out tracking plus the new kiosk app for workplaces.

XU: From reading every app review to including 32 feature requests from your users in the past year alone, how else do you plan to continue to keep up with the rapidly changing business technologies available today?

JD: Technology continues to change at an incredible pace and it’s challenging for many companies to keep up.  As a software company, we’re always looking at the landscape to identify other providers with whom we can integrate or partner with to benefit our customers.  In addition, we’re constantly reviewing our roadmap, speaking to our customers, watching the market and a variety of other techniques to ensure we’re shipping features that our current and potential customers actually need.

XU: I can see that with your +Billing account you can send invoice reminders, what other additional features do you offer that solve headaches for companies?

JD: The +Billing version of the product has the most robust reporting engine in the industry, it easily allows customers to move data via CSV flat file to other non-integrated partners, there is a client and project module so you can take a deep dive into these elements and it includes expense management. In terms of invoice reminders we developed an add-on called Invoice Tracker, it integrates with our +Billing product, QuickBooks, Xero and Time & Billing, it’s a great app that helps businesses to get paid faster. In its basic form it sends out invoice payment reminder emails – saving accounts receivable team members time so they can focus on other core functions.

XU: With new apps being developed and new companies starting all the time, what sets Time Tracker apart from other similar apps on the market?

JD: Many products have basic clock-in/clock-out but we take things further so the customer can track time in layers (client, project, task, job number etc), marry their time and expenses, create invoices and bill from one platform. This is to ultimately report and move data to just about any other software tool to truly integrate their business processes and best practices.

XU: So what’s next for Time Tracker and the team at eBillity?

JD: More features! We have an optimistic roadmap and a team ready to ship them. We’re in the middle of planning and developing; who is working, facial recognition, a time clock kiosk and more. We’re also working with Partners like Xero and Gusto to ‘fine tune’ our current offering to include enhancements that would mean a lot to their customers, like a seamless sync of PTO hours, multiple pay rates for jobs and automatically removing terminated employees from Time Tracker.

XU: Sounds like you have your hands full, best of luck and I look forward to seeing more from eBillity soon.