Topic: Help me graduate!

[gpw11]

Alright, so I'm ramping up to hammer out this graduation project that I've been putting off forever.  I'm currently in the proposal stages but it basically breaks down to this:

Revising the payroll accounting/billing system for a small residential contractor. The current system is pretty standard for the industry, but the company is at that awkward stage of growth where there's a high administrative time drain in doing this because they're large enough for multiple concurrent projects, but don't have the revenue or capacity to hire full time administrative staff or an operations manager.  As such, the owner and his wife basically spend a shit load of time transcribing data from time sheets into excel and eventually turning them into invoices.  A few problems with this:

-it's wasteful.  Like, we're talking 6-7 time sheets a day.  It takes a fair amount of time to parse through that, organize it, and turn it into invoices.  Time better spent on marketing or business development, especially when you consider that the owner is also on site at least 40 hours a week.

-it's not all that accurate.  There's a lot of room for error there. Trying to make out people's chicken scratch writing, the high chance of data entry error, all that.

-For the system to work correctly, you have to trust that employees are actually filling these things out correctly and NOT losing them.  Obviously there's little you can do about this, but making it easy and intuitive for employees will have to be a key part of the new system.

-It takes a lot of work to get any useful data from the raw info.  cost control data, productivity analysis, estimate to actuality differentials are all hard to determine because all the data is all over the fucking place.

The idea is to get a far more streamlined system.  At worst:  something that they could copy and paste into excel. 

What I would like to implement is an online-delivery system.  Employees submit their hours, tasks, and info online istead of handing in these sheets.  The simpilist method to do so would just be have a site with a form template that would be compatible with Excel and they could just copy and paste right into that mother fucker.  That's kids shit though, who wants that?  I'd like to have a system set up where employees enter the data and it automatically gets categorized.  By employee, jobsite, whatever.  So that the owners have a back end that they can log into, access the data for, say, the Henderson account, and just print that out or do whatever with it.

Does anyone know of any tools that may be useful for this? 

Initially, I was hoping for a sort of drop-box like tool or something like that (obviously a bit more advanced) which was a free service that everyone could access.  That may exist, but I haven't found all that much (if anyone knows, I'd totally appreciate it).  The owner, however, has expressed a desire to have a web site now, which will make things both easier and a bit harder.  Easier, because the tool now has a space to be built (even if it is just uploading a form), but a bit harder because now I have to spearhead the development of a web-site.  Anyone have a rough estimate on how much a simple website costs to get professionally developed?  Does anyone here do that (Cools?). 

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

[Cools!]

Concept is straightforward. The actual development time and fee would depend on the final scope of the project. Something to watch out for is that websites can drag on for some time because there's the functionality and the design aspect to consider. It's not uncommon for even basic sites to take a long time to develop because everyone wants to provide input on the design, etc. So you want to take control of the schedule and avoid having the client go crazy with minor details. It's often better to get the functionality done first, then bother with the little stuff. You want to make sure that you are very involved at the start to quickly determine if the developer you hired is actually capable of doing something like this in a timely fashion (there are a lot of flakes).

I haven't worked on a web project like this in some time, but based on what you described, I'd probably quote around $2,000-3,000 for the whole project, with probably a basic maintenance plan (take care of the server, backups, support, etc.). I probably wouldn't code it from scratch unless it's a really unique project and instead opt to use open source projects which would help with some of the boring, but very important, functionality (like security) and make it easier for the company to hire someone else to take care of the project in the future.

Try to do as much research as you can. I'm sure there are already (paid) services that do a lot of the functionality you are after. It might be easier to buy or license and existing product and modify it. Or simply have a basic static website with a section that links or embeds the actual service.

Anyway, I'll have a look tomorrow on what's available in this area.

[gpw11]

Awesome, thanks man.  I'll talk with my employer/project sponsor this week (hopefully tomorrow) to see what budget he has in mind for the website.  If anything, that'd probably the aspect of the project that would be scaled down due to time/budget/whatever else constraints. The process they want me to go through with this is just a complete pain in the ass.

Thanks again, I really appreciate it.

[Cools!]

Are you supposed to release an actual product? Or more or less go through the planning?

[gpw11]

Release an actual product.  The school has a pretty rigid (and yet vague) procedure for how this goes down.  I'm in the process of writing the proposal for the project, which is simply the revision of their payroll accounting and invoicing system.  I'm trying to be a bit vague in the proposal stage because they want this shit to take me 300 hours, which it isn't going to.  So, I'm looking to include a "research and consultation" phase of the actual project and try to suck up some hours there.

But, end of the day, my company will have a new, preferably online-based system for doing their payroll and invoicing. Something like this which I just found.  Actually, maybe exactly that.  The thing is that I'd like to make this as intricate of a project as I possibly can, because I don't think they'll let it fly if I'm just like "I signed them up for, and set up their account with, XXXX service".  When we first got into this, it looked like I'd have to build the tools from scratch.   I'd like for them to have the best system that they can, and something like Freshbooks seems like it would be the ideal way to go.  My main problem here is tackling getting the ground level motherfuckers on board with doing shit differently.

The website was more of an afterthought brought up by the owner as we were going over the specifics of how this MAY work.  He'd definitely like some sort of web presence, and from a marketing standpoint it'd be kind of stupid not to have one (even just for the domain linked email).  I'd love to include it as working that part out and integrating it in with the rest of my project would flesh it out a bit, but I'm not sure what his expected budget it for it...something I will look into immediately.

[ren]

I used to work for a small accounting firm that did that worked with lots of area small businesses. I ended up switching a lot of them to Quickbooks to accomplish a lot of the things you're trying to do. All of them seemed happy with the change and whenever they needed support after the initial setup they'd call Intuit instead of us which saved a lot of hassle. I didn't actually work with online payroll submission stuff but I'm pretty sure that's available.

For the data stuff, I would just make a rigid template in Excel and then set up a macro or some formulae to interpret it.

[Cools!]

If you can leverage an existing product that'll make things a lot easier. If you can get away with it of course. Maybe cover that aspect up by building the new company website. There's a lot of stuff you can add, like SEO, site optimization, multi-browser support, etc.

Either way, if there's a website involved, get it going soon because even trivial features can take a long time to materialize. Get a budget from your client so you can start looking at designers/developers. If you are set on doing a company site you [your company, designer, etc.] can already start thinking about the design of it (colors, logos, layout) and prepare the assets (logo, text). To give you an example, I did a very basic website a few years back, very straightforward, but it still took like 2-3 months to finalize because the client wanted small changes and I had to wait for the text to come in, etc.

[gpw11]

Honestly, eveyone has pretty much recommended Quickbooks up to this point, so that may be the option....after I generate a report comparing the top tools against specific criteria (seriously, I'm making so many reports for shit you should be able to just make decisions on.  Thanks school.)  I need to look at it more (in the proposal phase I'm being vague so I can actually put the research as part of the project), but it could very well be it.  Especially if it has cloud capabilities and time sheet submittal.

And thanks for the tip on the website creation time, cools.  I should actually hop on that asap....but in secret because I have to create my assessment report on the website viability and cost/benefit ratio immediately following my software recommendation report. Which is dependant on project approval.  Goddamn.  I'm pretty sure I will be spearheading that though, so I'll get the budget details and go from there.

Quick question though, the gallery they have at http://pmhomes.net/h2Gallery.html (yeah, it came up when I was checking domain names) is very similar (at least in execution, if not style) to what most contractors/developers/builders have on their sites.  The thing is that they're almost always out of date. How do these types of galleries generally work? Would it be possible to have it so that a builder or developer could just upload pictures/stats themselves at project completion, or would you need to get a web developer in? 

I'm assuming that it's totally possible, as templates or forms or whatever must exist that real estate agents or others with high turnover rates on products that need exposure must use. I mean, it should be simple, upload pic, short write up or fill out stat form, it's on your page.  But seriously, pretty much every builder's site is years out of date with projects, so that kind of leads me to believe that it's just shit that they gave the developer to put on there at the time of site creation. 

[Cools!]

Yeah you can make the galleries automated in the way you described. I've written code for my own sites that does that; you upload the photos and update a file with the text. The end users just needs to know how to prepare the images (resize) and how to upload and edit files using FTP. Designers often prefer to have a template that they update in something like Dreamweaver. You can also install photo gallery systems that gives you an interface to upload, resize, name, etc. the photos, but it's probably a bit much for what you need (and it requires setting up a database). Finally, you can also use a free service for the photo uploading (like Flickr, etc.) and embed the photos on your page by copying/updating a template.

And yeah, most builders I know around here don't do a great job of updating their websites on a regular basis either.