Dedicated Quickbooks Monitor Pays for Itself

It’s long been my opinion that hourly consultants who work on-screen most of the time are plagued with a lack of billing consistancy, losing both money and client confidence. I see this all the time with sub-contractors, and in forums I’ve read there are few who demonstrate a consistant methodology for recording the time they spend on client projects. So, for years I’ve struggled with ways to improve my recording of client work. End of the day. End of the hour. Little reminder beeps. You name it.Â

The one thing that has made a huge difference, and that I recommend for you too is to purchase a 2nd LCD monitor, and dedicate it to Quickbooks Weekly Timesheet.  Don’t use it for your email. Don’t pop up windows there. At the start of the day open Quickbooks, Open the Weekly Timesheet, Select yourself, and leave it there … all day.  If you’re running multi-user version, each of your employees can do the same. The costs for a 17″ high quality LCD and cabling is less than $200, which you’ll probably recoup in a couple of weeks.Â

If you don’t want to run Quickbooks on the system all the time, you could use this with Intuit’s Time Tracker or MC2 anywhere’s web-based system  too. With this, you could just run Firefox in the 2nd monitor and be done. Â

PS: Occasionally exit quickbooks so your backup system can pick it up.

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