Intersys Expedites Timesheets and Billing with Journyx

Q: Tell me about Intersys Consulting
A: We have four areas of focus:

1. project-based software development and project consulting, which includes iPhone app custom software
2. staff augmentation
3. direct hire business, providing direct hires up to the director level
4. offshore staffing in India.

We have about 100 employees that are permanent, salaried consultants.

Q: What industries do you work in?
A: We work in all industries though most of our customers are high tech companies.

Q: What type of time tracking system were you using prior to Journyx? Why was it not meeting your needs?
A: We became a Journyx customer about a year ago (in early 2010). We needed a solution very quickly that fit our needs. Time tracking, billing, making sure that employee and project hours are correct – these are all very important to us.

Intersys provides consultants to many high-tech companies. These employees work on-site and our customers need to be aware of their hours and agree to them every step of the way. We don’t want a customer to come back and say, “Why am I being billed for this?”

We use Paychex as our payroll provider. Paychex offers a solution for time-keeping; we decided to use that since we were already using Paychex for payroll, assuming it would meet our needs. It turned out to be a very complicated system, not intuitive and not user-friendly. Our staff complained about it and we actually had a key customer say it was a pain to use. We knew at that point we needed a new system.

Q: What led you to the decision to go with Journyx Timesheet?
A: Many reasons. Journyx has a very responsive staff and also, the product just works really well. One of the features we find most useful is the notification feature. Our customers must approve all employee timesheets each week. It used to be a mad scramble every Monday morning to make sure that all timesheets were turned in. With Timesheet’s notifications, we only have to remind 1 or 2 people each week. This saves us a lot of time.

When we were using Paychex for time tracking, the user interface was confusing and employees were making mistakes putting in their information. We were always searching for passwords, too, since it didn’t have a good password reset option.

Q: How is Timesheet being used at your company?
A: Mostly for time tracking and expenses. We use it for all of our billable consultants who work at our clients’ sites. We use the Accountlink module of Timesheet for integration with Paychex and Quickbooks. This ability to integrate is critical for us.

We use Timesheet for tracking our fixed price project work and approving employee hours. Journyx Reportlink lets us analyze the information we gather in Timesheet by generating reports in a variety of ways. We generally run reports with the data sliced in this way: hours by consultant by time period (two weeks) by PO number. This is the data we find most useful and it’s nice that we can quickly run a report to give us this information.

We like that Timesheet allows us to give our clients access to these reports so they can view the data without us sharing overly-sensitive information from our system.

We provide staff augmentation for many of our clients. At these large companies, there is usually one primary provider of staffing onsite that provides all levels of people, from entry level on up. We specialize in high-level IT managers. Oftentimes, we’re in competition with the onsite firm because they have a huge advantage: they’re at the client location. Since we’re off-site, more paperwork is required and therefore, it’s critical that we make it as easy as possible to work with us because otherwise, clients will just go with the onsite company. Journyx makes the entire process really simple and provides an easy system for clients to use. This gives us a competitive edge.

Here’s an interesting story: one of our clients recently had a quarterly business review. Intersys was included in the review and we achieved the highest rating due in part to Journyx and its ease of use. Before with this customer, timesheets were being filled out wrong on site and time tracking in general was a big pain. Our client told us, “When we told you that time tracking was a hassle and that you should look into a different method, you listened to us and made the change. Now time tracking is simple. We appreciate that.”

Q: How is the software helping your organization? Have you seen any specific results?
A: We’ve definitely seen results.

• We’re able to provide better customer service to our clients
• We save at least 2 hours every week because the time data is put in correctly the first time
• We’re not billing late anymore – 1 day late on billing results in being paid one week later
• We can collect employee time in an expeditious fashion

And a specific example of how Journyx has helped us with customer service: many of our Fortune 500 clients do billing audits. They usually hire an outside company to catch billing errors. One of our biggest clients was just audited for a time period of three years, encompassing 600-700 invoices. The auditing company came back with no errors related to time tracking. This is, of course, attributable to our awesome office manager but also to Timesheet.

InterSys Consulting is a premier provider of consulting services. Intersys targets proven talent through an expansive network built by Principals at InterSys Consulting. http://intersysconsulting.com/

J.R. Carter has 15 years experience developing IT solutions. He began working with InterSys Consulting as an independent consultant in 2004 and joined the company as CEO in 2005. Based in Austin, J.R. is on the board of directors of EMS software provider and InterSys client, ESO Solutions, Inc. He volunteers as a Mentor at Austin Partners in Education.