ClickTime Web Timesheet Leverages Logi 8 to Add Reporting Power to Timesheet Applications

About Clicktime.com

Imagine using the Internet to access your timesheet and track your expenses from anywhere in the world. Imagine having more than forty customizable reports shown onscreen or as PDF documents, giving you exactly the information you need. And, imagine being able to export data from these reports to Excel, XML, accounting or payroll systems—and having it all accessible at the touch of a key, even on your cell phone.

This was the vision that Alex Mann had when, in 1997, he founded Clicktime.com as one of the pioneer Software as a Service (SaaS) organizations. Since its inception, Clicktime.com’s mission has been to deliver high-quality, user-friendly business applications to Web-enabled clients. The success of ClickTime Web Timesheet, the company’s flagship product, is a direct result of this commitment. Today, ClickTime Web Timesheet serves thousands of customers in over 30 countries.

The main function of ClickTime Web Timesheet is to deliver outsourced time tracking quickly and easily to service organizations, without the need to install complex hardware or software. ClickTime Web Timesheet was the first product of its kind to allow offline time reporting, Web-based reports and customizable data sharing with legacy applications.

The Challenge

Recently, ClickTime.com decided to upgrade their reporting engine for the ClickTime Web Timesheet. They set out to find a company and a product that matched their own business values and application design. Specifically, they were looking for a single solution that could meet these three goals:

• Being simple to implement and maintain, allowing Clicktime.com to stay focused on delivering an effective timesheet product
• Being cost effective
• Adding considerable value for the ClickTime Web Timesheet customer.

“We had used legacy reporting and business intelligence (BI) products in the past, so we knew what we did not want,” says Alex Mann, Clicktime.com CEO. “As a hosted software company, we needed a solution that met our needs functionally and economically. We were not looking to add implementation complexity or expense.”

“These criteria led us right to LogiXML.”

The Solution

Through LogiXML’s purely Web-based solutions, Clicktime.com was able to match their requirements of straightforward functionality, cost-effectiveness and added value for their customers.

“From an executive perspective, I found that many BI and reporting vendors were adding what I would call ‘contrived complexity’ into their products; this has the appearance of adding value, but, in fact, it does not,” says Mann.

“A major part of the technical appeal of Logi 8 is the straightforward nature of the product. It is a very clean native .NET implementation built on a contemporary Web-based architecture that is not weighed down by legacy baggage. Doing the basics very well is what Logi 8 does best.”

“From a financial perspective, we really liked the fact that we only had to license the software we needed to get the job done. The LogiXML model calls for licensing the product—nothing more, nothing less—regardless of how we use the software. The fact that we were able to fully and easily embed the reports into our application was outstanding. I would say that Logi 8 is the most easily embedded BI product on the market,” concludes Mann.”

And, from a client perspective, the flexibility and scope of the LogiXML solution made the tangible impact Clicktime.com was hoping for. “As the product manager for ClickTime Web Timesheet, I appreciate the ability to provide our users with a technical environment that allows them to develop on their own the reports and analyses they need,” comments David Brockman, Clicktime.com product manager.

“While we provide more than 40-60 popular reports in our package that are essential to time management, we’ll never do as good a job building reports as our users do in their vertical markets. The users of ClickTime Web Timesheets are so diverse that we could never anticipate all the permutations of reports of our vertical markets in government, finance services, IT management, media and professional services. The Logi 8 approach allows our users to be creative in their own areas of expertise.”

The Results

Clicktime.com has been able to use LogiXML’s Web-based solutions as customizable assets for their company and their customers, giving users from different business functions the freedom to analyze data easily and in a way that suits their particular needs—without incurring any security or system risks.

“The Logi 8 Analysis Grid feature is a great example of how users can enjoy the power to create new reports and variations of reports so they can view the data the way they want. In an Analysis Grid, users can experiment inside a safe environment where they can’t really hurt themselves or the system, but can find that ‘Eureka!’ moment of insight from the data on their own,” states Brockman.

“From a technical perspective, the development environment has been a joy to work with in the LogiXML studio. The drag-and-drop deployment makes upgrades easy and the product performs well and scales well. And, with our worldwide client-base, LogiXML’s support for foreign scripts, Unicode and other Web standards let us offer this power to every customer.”

“The first phase of our LogiXML implementation has been to develop new reports, and that has gone very well,” concludes Brockman. “I am really looking forward to the next phase of upgrading all our existing reports to the state-of-the-art LogiXML platform. I expect to see significant productivity gains at the same time we improve the usability of our ClickTime Web Timesheet product for our users.”