Sage Coretime is Sage’s Time recording software package that allows you to record all your employee’s, associates, sub contractors, non employee’s and anyone else whose time you need to record and charge or not charge on to a client. But also it allows you to record all the expenses these people incur and want your client to pay for. The part we thought that would be the least difficult turned out ot be the the most difficulty, how to prepare a project budget, which in turn you can use to quote for the job your client is offering out to you and your competitors.
The level of detail we required is very detailed right down to each and every hour every person on the job plans to spend on the job. No average costs or average hours. Each person and each of their hours and what tasks they will be performing in each of those hours. We were shown many variations of budget entry recording but not what we needed and this was 10 minutes from the end of the training. We had been led to believe it could do all this. At this time I was very depressed, after two days of training we were about to abandon everything, but we decided to let the trainer talk to her technical people and see what could be done. And guess what, it appears it can be done and the option is there in the software and just needs to be turned on. Well we wait and see, as now we have to make time to test it out and if it does not work we are back to looking for time management software and also new accounts software.
This being a Sage product, Sage Coretime and Sage Line 50 do integrate to a limited degree, but enough for us to get the sale invoices created in Sage Coretime exported into Sage Line 50 without having to manually post everything in line by line. It only bring over the Net, VAT and Gross amounts and not the detail on the invoice, but this is all we need. We are holding off moving to Sage Line 50 until we test Sage Coretime as we don’t want to spend time on the accounts software as we are only purchasing it to allow the easy integration from Sage Coretime to Sage Line 50 accounts.
It is important that the link from Sage Coretime and Sage Line 50 is correctly setup to ensure that the Customer Details, Sales Invoices and Credit Notes transfer correctly to Sage and that the purchase invoices for costs and outlay transfer out of Sage Line 50 into Sage Coretime correctly and we can’t test that until Sage Coretime is approved as our Time management product. I await next weeks product test results.
As a by the way comment, Sage Coretime is a web application that runs on your local servers internet server (Windows IIS) and can use MySql or Microsoft SQL server to store your data. All you need then is a web browser to use it for time entry and reporting.