CHRON
CHRON is a small management software used to precisely track jobs performed for various clients. It can handle contacts, pricelists, task batches and more; the goal is to easily provide and register support services through contracts, which have a maximum limit and multiple task types.
Why
I developed this software by taking inspiration from a previous solution I created years ago, which was aimed at solving the same problems (but it was implemented like shit); I started re-designing it when a client of mine asked for a tool like this as a custom development project.
The aim is to make my life easier when handling lots of different daily tasks for multiple clients, each having a dedicated pricelist (hourly and travel prices) and many separated task batches, each with its own state, payment and description.
How
It’s just a plain and simple FileMaker solution, kept in sync as a single file with dropbox. Development took nearly three weeks of intensive work, more features like the statistics were added later; a customised and facilitated workflow was implemented for rapidly inserting new registered tasks through a wizard in the first window (that can be seen in the screenshot above).
The generation of complete reports was a crucial requirement, and it proved to be the most useful feature of the solution. Also it’s able to create automatic personalised emails sent to the various clients once a task is successfully registered, or a batch is filled up.
In the End
I should have done this before, it’s a time saver and it gave me a lot of flexibility for handling new clients and old ones with their respective agreed prices. Extracting monthly statistics gave me a clear visibility of which clients were more important, and which ones I should focus less on.