RAC Manager

Easily manage dozens of active Rent A Coder bids, prospects and projects.
Automatically generate detailed quotes for your potential buyers, getting more chances of being selected.
Keep track of the time you spend, and the profit you make on each project.
Have a clean, tidy and clear view of deadlines, status reports, etc, with a "Today" like view.
Manage a whole team of professionals, with different skills. Keep track of the projects already assigned to each member (Enterprise version).

Product Description

Have you ever made so many bids in RAC that later you couldn't remember what it was you had bid on?
Ever skipped a deadline or a status report?
Do you wonder what your hourly rate actually is, or how much time you have spent on that $50 project which was supposed to be done in an hour?
How close is the time you estimate a project will take you to the actual time you spend?
Are you a team of programmers, or a company, all working together under one account?

Get rid of all these problems. RAC's website is fine to manage your bids if you're a hobbyist, but if you're serious about making money in this community, you need something to help organize your time, your budget, your bidding and of course, your profits.

How will RAC Manager help you achieve that?

Product Features

RAC Manager is an organizer tool designed specifically to help you keep track and be aware of many things you're probably not aware of right now, which affect your productivity directly. Also, its automatic reminders will make sure you never skip a deadline, or forget to touch base with that customer you had to call.

With RAC Manager you can:

Keep track of prospects/projects, and the bid you make on each.
Every time you find a project that's interesting for you, you'll input it's basic information into RAC Manager, together with information about the bid you'll make. This will be marked as a "prospect" for a job.
Once you get selected by the buyer, the prospect will be turned into a project, allowing you to input more information, keep track of your time, and many more features. (more about this below)
Generate very detailed quotes for potential buyers.

For very big, very complex projects, it's usually very hard to estimate times.
When you're entering information about a project you're interested in, you'll be able to separate it into several "tasks" so you can organize the planning better and, for each of these tasks, you'll select what skills (Web Designer, VB Coder, etc) you'll need to complete it, and how many man-hours of each of these skills.

These skills will be defined by you, and each will have an hourly rate set.

The definition of the tasks doesn't have to be done all at the same time. You can save anytime and continue later, since you will probably be waiting for some answers from your buyer to know the exact scope of a task.

Once you're done defining all the tasks and their times the system will generate a detailed quote for you showing all the tasks with a brief description of each, the skills you'll need, the estimated times, and the rate on each one. You'll be able to define the level of detail you want for these quotes (you might not want your customer to know what's your hourly rate, or the amount of hours it will take you, for example).
This quote will be shown on screen, but you can also generate the HTML code to paste into the RAC bid, to send it to the customer.

This is one of the core features in RAC Manager, since it will help you:
- Have a clearer view of the project and what it'll take to do each part by helping you split the big project into parts which are easier to analyze independently.
- Generate a detailed quote, with a professional style, which will impress the buyer, let him know you have really thought the offer through, and thus, will immensely increase your chances of being selected for the project.
- Keep track of the time estimates you've made. You'll see below how this will help you track your performance.
Keep track of the time you spend on each project

Every time you do some work for any of the projects, you'll be able to load it into the system.
Once you're done with a project, this will let you see:
- How much time you spent on each task.
- How this time compares to what you estimated. This will help you quote better in the future.
- What's your real hourly rate
You'll also be able to load the hours you spend in RAC looking for new bids, so you will see how much of the time you spend is actually spent working.
This will of course help you improve your quoting, and organize your times.
Use automatic reminders, and the Calendar view, to make sure you never forget about a deadline again.
When you create a project, RAC Manager automatically creates a To-Do item for you at the deadline date, and if it's >$150, one for each Friday until that date.

One very useful feature is the "custom" automatic Todo's. You can set the system to automatically create todo's at specific relative days. For example, let's say you usually follow-up on a potential buyer 2 days after you've made a bid. You can simply create an auto ToDo for 2 days after you place bids, and the system will take care of reminding you.
Or maybe you usually upload code 4 days before the deadline, for the buyer to give it a look and tell you what he thinks. Then you'd just create an Auto ToDo for 4 days before deadline, and you're all set.
Also, you can manually add to-do items related to a project.

All these pending things to do will be shown in a calendar view, so you can have a very fast, and very graphical idea of what you have to do.

Finally, in the main menu of the application, the first thing you'll see is a "Today" screeen, showing you Overdue tasks, thing to do Today, Tomorrow and in the following 7 days, so you will always be reminded on your pending tasks.
Track your coder financials, your pending payments and your withdrawals.
See all your financial information, with much more control of what is shown and what is not than in RAC's screens.
Have a central Database with all the information about all the projects you did and are currently doing.
Have a central Database with all the information about your customers, their contact information, notes you take about them, connection info, passwords, etc.
Issue reports that will allow you to track your performance, know how well you estimated times, comparing them to the actual time you spent on projects, and more.

RAC Manager Enterprise Edition

Rac Manager Enterprise edition is specifically designed to cover the needs of the company that works in Rent A Coder.
It has all the features in the Standard version plus several more which will allow you to manage a team of developers, define special prices for recurring customers, advanced reports, and many more. Read on to find out about them...

Team Members
Define the members of your team, what their skills are, and how you will pay them (monthly salary, hourly rate, fixed amount per project, etc).
Assign Members to projects
In the Enterprise edition, when defining the task for a quote, you'll define the skills you need for the task, just as in the Standard edition, but when the Bid is accepted, you'll specify which members of your team will do what for each task.
This gives you, the manager, the highest possible flexibility allowing you to assign many people to one task, to different skills, or to the same skill, or any combination you need.
Work hours reporting by Team Member
Hour reporting is no longer just an informative report. In the Enterprise edition each member will report his hours, which will not only let you track performances and profits, but will also determine the payments you have to issue to each of them.
Use of Resources View
In order to manage your team members succesfully, you'll have to make sure no one is overloaded. For this, you'll use the "Use of Resources" screen, where you'll see the project/s assigned to each team member, with its deadlines and the estimated time they have to dedicate to the job.
Special prices for known customers
In any business, recurring customers are not the same as new customers and this is no exception in RAC. With RAC manager, you can set special prices (either higher or lower) for your known customers, which the system will automatically take into account when quoting.

PRODUCT STATUS

Right now, the project is in it's final development stages. Right now it's being thoroughly beta-tested, and it should be ready for release to the public around late Spring 2008.
Come back soon for updates!