Introduction

Time is money — for many of us, that phrase is our business mantra. You’re most likely looking at this book because you want to use Sage Timeslips to record the time you spend working and then bill your clients. Further, being a strongly motivated “time is money” person, you don’t want to waste time figuring out how to make Sage Timeslips do the job; you want to cut to the chase and get the job done. So, let’s get started.

About This Book

Sage Timeslips — Timeslips, for short — is a time and billing software package that you use to capture the time you spend doing things and the costs you incur on behalf of clients and then billing your clients appropriately. Although Timeslips was created for use by lawyers, it works exceedingly well for anyone who bills clients based on the time spent to complete a project: accountants, consultants, and architects, just to name a few.

Timeslips is a flexible software package, which is both good news and bad news for its users. The good news is that you can make Timeslips do just about anything you want, short of washing floors and windows. The bad news is that you have to know how to make it do those things. Flexible software packages don’t lead you down a specific path; instead, they let you lead the way and choose the road to travel.

I wrote this book to help you quickly get past the ugly part of getting Timeslips to do what you need so that you can get to the good part of having Timeslips do the job. You learn how to set up the background information Timeslips will need and how to enter slips, the records that describe how you spend your time. As you’d expect, I cover how you produce bills and, most importantly, track whether they’re paid.

It’s one thing to send out a bill and an entirely different thing to get paid. As every good marketing person knows, presentation counts. If your bill looks good and is easy to understand, you’re more likely to get paid quickly, so I show you how to create different bill layouts.

And that’s just the basics; as you’ll see, there’s so much more you can do with Timeslips to help you improve your profit picture. I don’t pretend to cover every detail of every feature in Timeslips. Instead, I’ve made Sage Timeslips For Dummies a real-life-situation kind of book by showing you how to use various features in Timeslips to handle everyday situations — you know, the stuff that you need to figure out how to handle in the real world.

Before we dive in, let’s get a few technical convention details out of the way:

• Text that you’re meant to type as it appears in the book is bold. The exception is when you’re working through a steps list: Because each step is bold, the text to type is not bold.
• Web addresses and programming code appear in monofont. If you’re reading a digital version of this book on a device connected to the Internet, note that you can click a web address to visit that website, like this: www.dummies.com
• Timeslips gives you several ways to navigate the interface. However, some of those ways are customizable, so I stick to using the Timeslips menu bar. When I discuss a command to choose on the menu bar, I’ll separate the elements of the sequence with a command arrow that looks like this: ⇒. For example, when you see File⇒Backup, that means you should click File on the menu bar and, from the drop-down menu that appears, click Backup.

Foolish Assumptions

I had to assume some things about you to write this book. Here are the assumptions I made:

• You know that you need to track the time you spend doing your job, identify the client for whom you do the work, and include a description of the work — as well as note the date you do the work. You might even have some sort of setup in place to record all this information. I don’t assume that you know how to do all that on a computer.
• You have some idea of what you’d like your bill to look like.
• You have a personal computer (that you know how to turn on) running Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8. I wrote this book by using Windows 7.
• You bought Sage Timeslips and installed it on your computer. Just in case you haven’t installed it, I include instructions for both a standalone computer and a network environment in Appendix A. Network users, installing Timeslips correctly is important, and the process is not straightforward.

Icons Used in This Book

The Tip icon marks, well, tips and shortcuts that you can use to make your work easier.

Remember icons mark the information that’s especially important to know. To siphon off the most important information in each chapter, just skim through these icons.

The Technical Stuff icon marks information of a highly technical nature that you can normally skip. This icon marks not only computer-related technical information but also technical subject-related information, such as accounting information related to tracking time and billing for it.

The Warning icon tells you to watch out because something could go wrong! It marks important information that may save you headaches, including common mistakes and ways to avoid them.

This icon signifies that you’ll find additional relevant content at

www.dummies.com/extras/sagetimeslips

Beyond the Book

In addition to the content in this book, you’ll find some extra content available at the www.dummies.com website:

• You’ll find the Cheat Sheet for this book at

  www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/sagetimeslips

• Online articles covering additional topics are available at

  www.dummies.com/extras/sagetimeslips

  Here you’ll find the articles referred to on the page that introduces each part of the book and sometimes at various points in the chapters, too. These articles provide information on electronic billing, using replacement slips, setting printer options, resolving BDE errors, and linking to general ledgers.

• Updates to this book, if I have any, are at

  www.dummies.com/extras/sagetimeslips

Where to Go from Here

You don’t have to read through this book cover to cover, because each section stands alone and provides step-by-step instructions for common tasks. You should consider this book a reference that you use when you need it.

That said, if you’re just getting started with Timeslips, you might want to turn the page and follow, in order, the chapters in Part 1. Then feel free to explore any topic you like, using the table of contents or the index to help you find a topic.