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 Imagine using the Web to access your timesheet and track your expenses from anywhere in the world. Think about having more than forty flexible, powerful reports, shown onscreen or as PDFs to help keep you on course. What about exporting data to Excel, XML, accounting and payroll systems; and having it accessible to you on your handheld device? Great ideas.
While we have come to accept many of these advances today, the picture was a little cloudier when Alex Mann started Clicktime.com in 1997 as one of the first Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors.
In the years since, Clicktime.com's mission has been to deliver high-quality, incredibly friendly business applications to the Web-enabled user. The success of the ClickTime Web Timesheet, the company's flagship product, is a direct result of this commitment. Today it serves thousands of customers in over 30 countries on a 24/7/365 basis.
The ClickTime Web Timesheet delivers quick and easy, outsourced time tracking to service organizations without the need to install complicated hardware or software. It was the first product of its kind to allow off-line time reporting, Web-based reports, and customizable data-sharing with legacy applications.
When the company recently decided to upgrade its reporting engine for the ClickTime Web Timesheet, they sought out a product and a company that mirrored their own application design and business philosophy. Customer data is stored in ClickTime’s secure servers, so users can focus on time management rather than deal with time tracking headaches. The specification for the new reporting product called for a cost-effective solution that would add value for the ClickTime Web Timesheet customer while allowing ClickTime to stay focused on delivering a great timesheet product.
“We had used legacy reporting and Business Intelligence products in the past, so we knew what we did not want,” said 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.”
“From an executive perspective, I found that many BI and Reporting vendors were adding what I would refer to as contrived complexity into their products that have the appearance of adding value but, in fact, do not. 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 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 Logi model calls for licensing the product -- nothing more, nothing less -- regardless of how we are using 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 private-labeled BI product on the market,” concludes Mann.
“As the product manager for ClickTime Web Timesheet, I appreciated the ability to provide our users with a technical environment that allows them to develop the reports and analyses that they need on their own,” notes David Brockman, 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 could do in their vertical markets. The users of ClickTime Web Timesheets are so diverse that we could never anticipate all the permutations of reports for our vertical markets in government, financial services, IT management, media and professional services. The Logi 8 approach allows our users to be creative in their own areas of expertise.”
“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, the user 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.”
“From a technical perspective, the development environment has been a joy to work with in the Logi studio. The drag-and-drop deployment makes upgrades easy and the product performs well and scales well. And with customers worldwide, Logi’s support for foreign scripts, Unicode and other Web standards lets us offer this power to every customer.”
“The first phase of our Logi implementation has been to develop new reports, and that has gone very well,” adds Brockman. “I am really looking forward to the next phase of upgrading all our existing reports to the state-of-the-art Logi 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.”
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