We crashed the bus... but we built a new one!
Back around 2014, I couldn’t scale the business without developing our own time tracking tools. There was nothing that did what we needed at the time.
Coming from a cumbersome Macro enabled Excel sheet, Jess and I found ourselves spending a lot of time every month just dealing with timesheets.
So we built our own software, we called it BusMan (Business Manager) back in 2014.
It allowed us to scale from 5 employees to over 30 employees, with only one part time school hours admin processing timesheets, invoices, quote's, POs, and more.
But we used cutting-edge tech at the time. It deprecated quickly, and then was hard to support.
We tried moving it over to React, however, then the backend wasn’t cutting it.
So we have built it again, completely from scratch!
Using more 'commodity' software with a much bigger base of developers we can bring in to extend or patch it, when needed.
I hate when someone tells us we have to build it all over again, because this seems like a copout not being able to fix the mess we got into. But in software, sometimes it’s easier and cheaper to do it that way rather than trying to bodge the old system.
It’s built on the same platform as our Cranio system, although does a very different job.
The learnings from both platforms have really helped us build the deep knowledge base to help our clients when needed with IoT based software.
For now, with a new shiny BusMin, we are Minimising our Busy work, hence the updated name...
BusMin... Busyness, minimised... 'Busy Less'
We have lots of workflows planned to improve our day to day so we spend more time on doing meaningful work, and less time on the busy-work.
Stay tuned, if this software stuff doesn’t bore you!
BusMin is our very own business management software, version 2.0, developed in-house to meet Element Engineering’s work log, billing, and HR requirements.
And we think we’re not alone in wanting a better way.
BusMin takes care of:
· Making work logs
· Calculating the total cost of billable work using activity IDs and employee rates
· Approving employee worklogs by team managers
· Creating quotes and tracking their progress
· Applying for leave days
· Integrating with MYOB, our accounting software
We’ve improved the user experience with a faster interface and a vibrant reskin. BusMin is now better at tracking work hours and visualising breakdowns between billable and internal work. We also added holiday, sick, and long service leave balances, and the ability to log them.
Our team just made the move across to 2.0. We’re currently working hard to get through the bugs towards a smoother, less busy process!