Tenrox: for richer or poorer, in good times and bad...
Updated February 12, 2016
Tenrox: for richer or poorer, in good times and bad...
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tenrox Professional Services Automation
Tenrox is being used for timekeeping and expense reporting against projects. We use Tenrox as a billing software mainly. Tenrox is one of three systems that we have to use and was chosen to be implemented when the previous Access Database reached capacity. It is being used across all of one of the divisions of our company, and I am currently evaluating the needs to be able to add another division. We are able to track employee billable hours, project totals, project profitability, and avoid lost billable time/expenses with the reporting abilities offered in Tenrox.
- User interface on time entry is simple to use.
- Reporting abilities are basically unlimited. If you put the information in to Tenrox, there is a way to report on it.
- Customer Service/Support not only at implementation but even after [becoming] an established user.
- Simple to set up new clients/projects/billing rules/rates/tasks/users/etc.
- The expense user interface and entry is not simple to use.
- I would like to see all entries needed by a user if multiple licensing features are purchased to be available at one screen. For example, if you have time and expense licenses in Tenrox, then the user can make entries for both features on the same screen.
- Ability to report on time and expense on the same reports without having to pay Tenrox for a custom report. You can only report on time or on expense. To get the information on one combined report, you have to have a custom report created.
- Tenrox enabled our company to continue to grow at an extremely high rate of speed and keep up with the payroll and invoicing needs that were changing along the way. We were in a manual system for processing previously with about 75 employees total and more than doubled in 6 months which made our process very difficult.
- Tenrox provided reporting to track charges that were not being billed that could be, allowed us to change the way employees entered billable and non-billable time, improved efficiency of administrative team and project managers.
- Tenrox allows us to provide detailed work reports for our clients to show description of services provided by running a single report over a given amount of time without having to keep hand written files that provided the same information previously.
Journyx was another option for us when we started looking to transition to a web-based system. Journyx is a very similar product to Tenrox and offers very similar perks.
Kronos is the system we use for payroll, as set by our corporate office. We have looked into configuring Kronos to be used as we use Tenrox now. We did not look into Kronos at the time of choosing Tenrox, only afterwards has it been suggested by our corporate office. I do not prefer the user interface we have in Kronos currently, but I have not seen what it would look like if it were transformed to how we use Tenrox.
The main thing with all of the systems: evaluating which one to choose is that we have the same issues with all of them. None of them completely contain all of our scenarios or produce ideal results. We felt that Tenrox was the one I could best set up from the beginning in development to get the closest to meet the biggest part of our needs. We were only adding one user group and office at that time. I have since expanded to include two additional office locations for all of our division.
Kronos is the system we use for payroll, as set by our corporate office. We have looked into configuring Kronos to be used as we use Tenrox now. We did not look into Kronos at the time of choosing Tenrox, only afterwards has it been suggested by our corporate office. I do not prefer the user interface we have in Kronos currently, but I have not seen what it would look like if it were transformed to how we use Tenrox.
The main thing with all of the systems: evaluating which one to choose is that we have the same issues with all of them. None of them completely contain all of our scenarios or produce ideal results. We felt that Tenrox was the one I could best set up from the beginning in development to get the closest to meet the biggest part of our needs. We were only adding one user group and office at that time. I have since expanded to include two additional office locations for all of our division.
PSA Feature Ratings
Using Tenrox Professional Services Automation
We have users in working remotely in the field across the country entering time and billable entries in Tenrox. We have 4 locations of office staff entering time and billable entries. We also have payroll processing and invoice processing, project managers, executives at the 4 office locations. We use Tenrox for a lot of reporting at many different levels. We have 22,211 projects in Tenrox (from the last 4 years for those 4 office locations), with 434,680 tasks.
I am the only person that knows Tenrox in and out for our organization. I use Tenrox support as needed. (maybe 5-10 support cases a year)
You need people that can fully understand what it is that your company does from all aspects of the business start to finish to really make Tenrox flow as it should.
You need people that can fully understand what it is that your company does from all aspects of the business start to finish to really make Tenrox flow as it should.
- Tenrox removed the need for so much manual entry for payroll and billing that were being done previously.
- The fact that Tenrox can be used by all of our users all over the country in any area is a huge plus.
- Tenrox allows for many different reports to be able to be created depending on what any given user needed to see.
- We are required to use an in-house invoice system (web interface-access database) by our corporate office. We export our invoice data from Tenrox to import to that system so that it is easy to track the information and still remove a large portion of the manual entry we had before.
- Our corporate office requires us to use Kronos for actual punch in/out, time off, time keeping software for payroll purposes. We are able to generate reports from Tenrox to capture the data from remote users to send to corporate for payroll processing through Kronos.
- Project Management
- Service Automation to combine some of the steps we manually take at this point still
Evaluating Tenrox Professional Services Automation and Competitors
Yes - We replaced a custom designed Microsoft Access database that a previous employee had created and no one else knew how to edit or how it was configured. The database grew too large for the amount of information we were needing to continually add to it and began corrupting itself. Tenrox became a necessity. We also had more than doubled in size (one office) and the amount of manual entry had dramatically increased into the Access database for invoicing. It was not longer the most efficient method.
- Price
- Product Features
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
Since we had been entering information manually from excel timesheets and expense reports previously into an Access database (started at about 25 employees and grew to 100 employees in a year then doubled again in 6 months), the fact that Tenrox removed the manual entry and possible human error was a huge bonus. We also had expanded to more remote areas and Tenrox allowed our users to enter the time directly into a system without needing to email in a bunch of files/documents each week for payroll and invoicing.
We did not have a lot of input from other offices or areas of our company when we had to make the decision to move forward with Tenrox. If able to do it again, it would be nice to have the ability to really dive into all of the options it has available out of the box (without special customization).
Tenrox Professional Services Automation Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Yes - Once development was complete with Tenrox, I implemented Tenrox to a defined group of users that would enter time for different areas of work on different types of projects to work out any questions that would potentially arise as we added more users to the system. Then, after a few weeks passed, we slowly added in more users every few weeks until we had all users in our local office added. The group we were moving to Tenrox included users in remote locations of this state and other states. I traveled to those locations and held training sessions with those users. They all began using Tenrox within the first six months development was complete. We added a total of 250 users over the first year.
Change management was minimal - We did not experience much, if any, change management in the transition to Tenrox. We just applied Tenrox to our current processes and kept moving forward. The main thing that changed with Tenrox was the way in which employees entered billable time and expenses. The project management steps and role was already defined before Tenrox was implemented.
- Maintaining the current invoicing and system while developing and implementing a new one and avoiding duplication of information in both systems.
- The version of Tenrox when we had implementation was not as user friendly as the current version is so training some of our personnel with far less computer skills was difficult and slow.
Tenrox Professional Services Automation Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
A user had accidentally deleted all of our custom reports for payroll processing on a Monday morning, as we were trying to process payroll on a pay week. Support was able to get the original files and get them loaded into our environment in record time to keep us from experiencing too much downtime (to our own fault) and allow us to complete payroll on schedule.
Using Tenrox Professional Services Automation
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Time Entry
- New User creation
- Project Creation
- Client Creation
- Work Type Creation
- Billing Rules
- Creating AdHoc reports
- Running Reports
- Expense Entry
- Reporting on time and expense on same report
Yes, but I don't use it