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Welcome to TAB

Getting startedWhat TAB is and the daily flow at a glance.

Welcome to TAB

TAB is your firm's time and billing app. It's where you track the hours you work, get them approved by a manager, and roll them up into reports your firm uses to bill clients. If you've been keeping time in a spreadsheet, a notebook, or another practice management tool, TAB replaces that piece.

This article is a one-page tour of how a normal day flows.

Who TAB is for

  • Accountants log their own time, fix mistakes, and submit batches for approval.
  • Managers review what their team submitted, approve or reject, and run reports across the whole firm.
  • Admins set firm-wide rules (rounding, mandatory fields, rate cards), manage users, and have all of the manager abilities.

You see only what your role lets you see. Accountants can't approve their own time, and only managers and admins see the Approvals link in the top nav.

The daily flow

A typical day with TAB looks like this:

  1. Track time as you work. Click Start timer on the dashboard, pick a client, and go. The timer keeps running with a chip in the page header until you stop it.
  2. Tidy up at the end of the day. Look at Time entries, edit the start/end times or notes if anything's wrong.
  3. Submit for approval. Tick the entries you're happy with and click Submit for approval. They move out of your stopped pile and into your manager's review queue.
  4. Manager reviews. Your manager approves or rejects each entry. Rejected entries come back to stopped status with the reason attached, so you can fix them and resubmit.
  5. Reporting and billing. Approved time shows up on the Unbilled report. When admin locks the entry it can't be edited anymore.

That's five states, one direction of travel: running → stopped → submitted → approved → locked. Rejection is the only backwards step.

Nothing leaves the app on its own

Nothing in TAB is ever shown to a client automatically. Your entries, notes, timestamps, and edits stay inside your firm. Even after billing, what the client sees is an invoice your admin produces, not the raw entries. Type freely in the notes field.

What about the desktop app?

There's an optional TAB desktop app for Mac (Apple Silicon today; Windows is coming soon) that puts a timer in your menubar and prompts you when you've been idle for 10 minutes. It talks to the same backend as the web app, so anything you do in one shows up in the other. You don't have to use it. See Download the desktop app if you want to try it.

Where to go next

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