REVIEW OF TIME MANAGER A Program from Traveling Software Review by Howard Allen Cohen 72416,710 . This review is based on five days' usage of this program, including printing reports after two days. I may have other comments after I use it for a full month and then print out the reports in preparation for monthly billing. My application for this program is a one attorney law office. Although my support staff sometimes keep time records of their work, only I am using the Model 100 to keep time records and am using this program. The purpose of Time Manager is to keep track of the user's time, to the minute, for billing or other purposes. Time is assigned to projects or clients (the "proj/client" six character field), and divided by tasks or activities (the "act" three character field). When you define the codes to use for the activity field, you may assign a billing rate for each code. For example, one could assign $75 per hour for office work for conferences and $150 per hour for trial work. One may override the rate on any timeslip screen, but one cannot assign different billing rates by client, which is the way I work (that is, I don't charge different rates for different activties, although I do charge different rates to different clients and to the same client depending on the nature of the work). When one fills in a time slip screen, one is presented with nine fields. The first (mandatory), is the client or project field. When any field is filled up, the cursor moves to the next field. One can jump over empty spaces in a field by pressing , which will move the cursor to the next field. After one leaves the client field, the activity field is filled in, and is also mandatory. If you have defined the up to three character code you put in here, the billing rate field (several down) will be automatically be filled with the rate. This may be overridden by overtyping, which pushes the old characters off of the field into oblivion. You can make up activity codes on the fly. The next field is the date, which is read from the system's clock. If may be overridden. The next is the time, which consists of two separate fields, each with two digits. You can put the time in, or you can use the timer function, described below. If I used this field as Traveling Software intended, I might loose a significant amount of revenue. The program makes it easy to keep track of your time to the minute, but professionals usually do not do this. I used to keep track of time to the quarterhour, but now, following the requirements of the U.S. Bankruptcy courts (a practice I fell into when my former employer law firm merged with a bankruptcy firm), I now bill to the tenth of the hour. This gives me an edge when frequent, short tasks are performed, such as telephone calls and review of correspondence. Lest you think that this is abusive, try to keep tract of your time for a day and see how little time you really put down. What I do it enter my time in six minute increments, and I also revise the auto-entry timer to round up to the tenth of a minute. The timer may be invoked at any time the timeslip screen is up by pushing . will stop the timer and put the results in the time fields, to the minute. I then revise this as stated above, and complete the rest of the screen. Nothing can be done with the machine while the timer is functioning. After the time fields are entered, and you can temporarily skip them by entering zeros, you must answer Y or N to the question, "Billable/Not Billable?" If the answer is yes, the lookup function with the filling rate is done. If the answer is no, zeros are put in the rate field. The last two fields have about 30 (I don't recall exactly) characters each for a description or comment. When you enter these last fields, you may save the slip , skip it and start over, or end and go back to the main menu. You can find slips by entering the client name and pressing for the find function. You can then delete any slip or revise it. You can look at them all, one at a time. All slips are stored in ASCII order based on the client field. Sorting is automatic upon saving each slip. Keep this tip in mind--you MUST enter a carriage return after the last field you enter data in or that data will not be saved. I did not pick that up in the manual (it might be there), which is otherwise excellent, and assumes the reader knows nothing about the machine. I hope to keep a whole month's timeslips at a time, which is necessary for my billing practice. RAM space is a consideration here. The main program, which I have been describing, takes 7.5k. The data files, which must be in RAM, will grow each day. Figuring roughly that each slip could take 50 bytes if filled up, 20 work days per month with an average of ten slips each day equals 10k, more or less. I should be able to handle this with a 32k machine. The main program also has a view summary function from its menu which permits a quick on screen only report of the summaries of the data invarious formats, all menu driven. For the real reports, you must load a separate program which is supplied. This one will print reports to the printer (default), or if you patch the program (its easy and documented), output can go to either the screen, a ram file, or a disk (its compatible with the Chipmunk). Watch out here. If you print to RAM, you will quickly run out of memory if you print in the "invoice format," which starts a new page after each client or project. After three days of work, such a file was printed to disk and was over 19k! This is because of trailing blanks, etc. I plan to use this report format to add to my bills as an attachment, but I shall either print them directly, redirect output to disk only, or redirect output to the serial port for uploading to an MS-DOS computer. The other format, which should produce smaller output files, gives the same data put does not print a separate page for each client. A summary of all of the activity codes is printed after each report, along with a total of all the billing amounts. When this either program is running, the screen cannot be printed (the print key is disabled), so individual slips cannot be printed. My overall impression of the program, which cost me $60 (I think), is good. The big question is whether it is better than a pegboard, manual timeslip system. Manual timeslips are faster than typing in data into small fields on a Model 100, but they are usually legible. By taking more time to enter the data this way, I am assured a presentable report which can be attached to a typed bill, or for some applications, becomes the bill itself. A separate Data Manager program is included on the cassette, which permits mailmerge type usage with T-Writer and other Traveling Software programs. It also allows the culling of the data file for selected informaton. Traveling Software's Memory Manager program, as usual, is included. Its pretty good for file handling if you don't have CDOS, and it makes files hidden and the reverse. I had a problem with the comment fields, not understanding the requirement of a carriage return at the end of the last field. I called Traveling Software and was promissed that someone would call be back. My call was not toll free, but Neil Smith, the director of support, called me back and was very helpful. I have had a lack of mail support from this company in the past (with IDEA!), and they are not on CIS, but they are accessible by telephone. The number, 206-367-8090, is not in the manual, but it is on their literature. In conclusion, so far I would recommend the program.