Ingrid: My name is Ingrid Jensen and I work for a company called Ardalyst. I’m the VP of administration and finance and our company does software solutions, cybersecurity, amongst a bunch of other stuff.
BigTime: What challenges led you to look for a software like BigTime?
Ingrid: We brought BigTime in when we started up the company and got our first time and materials contract – we needed a way to gather the time and be able to invoice the client and have it integrate with our accounting software which was QuickBooks Desktop and BigTime made the most sense at the time and still does.
BigTime: What led your firm to trust BigTime for DCAA compliance?
Ingrid: It was really easy to turn on DCAA compliance because we have two instances, we run commercial and a federal instance because we do work for both kinds of clients, so it’s flipping a switch. It takes care of all of the auditing and other requirements that we have for DCAA so people get dinged if their time is entered too late, etc, without being wildly expensive like some of the other DCAA-compliant time and expense applications are.
BigTime: Which feature have you found most valuable?
Ingrid: The DCAA compliance, it feeds into the whole DCAA system so in other words, as we’re posting the timesheets, it does it in a way that allows us to produce the reports that are required for DCAA auditing, including all the way through project costing. So, it allows the timesheets to line up properly, and it handles sort of the overtime calculations, the unreimbursed overtime calculations, that are necessary without any kind of extra work.
BigTime: How does BigTime help your accounting team stay audit ready?
Ingrid: There’s a post-timesheet function so it stops any of the postings from happening until the time has been entered and submitted and approved, so it’s been fully vetted. And then our accountant just clicks a little cloud symbol and it posts it up to QuickBooks, and from there it feeds into both the invoice and the timesheet which then makes it go around the full circle where the reports are linking the time both on the invoice, on the revenue, and on the cost side.
BigTime: Where have you seen the biggest change in productivity?
Ingrid: People are always surprised when I talk to them about just how fast it is. If it’s a month where we’re trying to get out a dozen or 20 invoices or something like that, we’ve been able to do it same-day. We enforce time entry by midnight of the last day of the month, and the next morning we come in and managers approve the time, and we start generating invoices by lunchtime, get the approval, and get them out to the client by the end of that day. It’s that fast. Then we turn around and post the timesheets so then the cost side of it is done as well. It’s just quick and it’s flexible. A lot of times, especially on the government contracting side, the client wants to see the invoice look a certain way or be formatted a certain way and BigTime doesn’t really have any problems handling that. Like I’ll come in and say “Okay, well I need it sorted this way” or “I need it grouped this way” or “I need it summarized or need more/less detail” and it’s quick and it remembers how I liked doing it the last time. It just churns out the invoices the same way.
See how BigTime stacks up to our competitors according to users in the G2 PSA Software Grid Comparison Report.
