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The first chapter ("Concepts Guide") provides an introduction to BigTime's capabilities and features. You'll learn how BigTime can help you manage budgets, projects, staff, contractors, and more. We'll help you understand how BigTime organizes all of your data, and we'll introduce you to several of the built-in workflow features that will make running your business easier, especially as you grow. You'll also get a quick look at BigTime's extensible architecture, which makes it a powerful and flexible addition to your existing set of management tools.
The Installation chapter is a complete administrator's guide to deploying BigTime in your firm. You only have to install BigTime on a single computer in your office, so getting the system up and running is extremely simple.
BigTime is a browser-based application which turns whatever computer you install it on into a web-server. Then, you users will get to it by simply opening up their browser and typing in the URL for your corporate BigTime site.
The Navigation Basics chapter will get you logged into the system, and will introduce the program's major sections and menus. BigTime's screens all have common elements which make the system easier to understand and navigate. A quick introduction to these elements is all you'll need before you're ready to start using the system.
Once you understand BigTime's basic organizational elements, you can dive into any of the functional chapters to learn how to add projects, create budgets, manage tasks or to-do lists, and more.
Once you're familiar with the system's basics, you're ready to dive into the functional chapters. These functional chapters are organized around business processes, not around a screen-by-screen review. You'll read about invoicing or timesheet review or setting up budgets in each of the detailed chapters.
The index at the back of the book will help you zero in on specific features and settings. We'd suggest, however, that you take a few minutes to read the entire chapter on a given topic. That approach will help you get familiar, not simply with how to turn a specific feature on or off, but how that feature fits into the larger picture.
For QuickBooks users, the Integration chapter picks up where the Installation chapter leaves off. You'll link BigTime to QuickBooks in the Installation chapter. The Integration chapter provides a lot more detail about how to configure that link. BigTime ships out of the box with some default links, but you can configure the system (often field-by-field) to fit your firm's specific requirements.
Every QuickBooks company file is different, and when you connect your firm's file to BigTime, you're showing parts of that file to your entire firm--often for the first time. While the way your accounting information is organized may make sense to you or your accounting department, it may need to be "cleaned up" before it makes sense to the rest of the firm.
We cover some basic clean-up tasks in the Installation chapter, but the QuickBooks Integration chapter details exactly how the two systems will be sharing data. That will give you a better handle on what you might need to do within your data file to make it easier for the rest of the firm to understand.
As we've already mentioned, the System Guide focuses on business processes. We try to avoid a detailed review of settings and configuration options when we're in the middle of reviewing a specific business process. We don't, for example, break out of our step-by-step invoicing review to talk about how to setup the system for multi-currency support. Typically, we'll simply refer to you to the relevant section of the Configuration chapter.
While you may be tempted to read the Configuration chapter first, we've placed it at the end of the System Guide so that you're referring to it in context. We've also kept the step-by-step discussions in this chapter brief. That means you can get in, adjust the setting you're interested in, and get out quickly. It also means we're assuming, in that chapter, that you've already read through the relevant "business process" chapters so that you understand the impact adjusting a given setting will have.
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