Tommie review

Tommie is a web program that could revolutionise the way your business works. Part meeting scheduler, part management tool, it's altogether one of the most flexible ways we've seen to manage common office chores.

Through a web browser, Tommie lets you and colleagues schedule meetings, set reminders, and track client time, jobs and expenses. It also lets managers analyse core business information such as staff efficiency.

If that sounds like a complex mix, it doesn't feel like it when you first run the program. Tommie's functions are neatly divided into multiple sections accessed through a bar at the top of its home page.

For managers, Tommie's core lies in its Admin section. As well as holding company information such as working patterns and holiday entitlement, you can also set categories for meetings, expenses and office departments.

In day-to-day use, though, staff users will spend most time in the Calendar or My Day sections. The latter neatly presents your current day's tasks memos, notes, meetings, timesheets and expenses in a single window. The Calendar displays a graphical overview of the logged-in user's forthcoming meetings and events, and clicking on a calendar date switches to a chronological list of that day's meetings. Managers can view the schedule of all staff in the same chart.

Click one of the small icons adorning every calendar date and you're taken to meeting request page where you can select attendees and locations. The meeting will then appear in attendees' calendars; they'll also be notified by email. Staff holidays are shown on the calendar so you can quickly see who's free at a glance. In ease of use terms, it beats the likes of Microsoft Outlook hands down.

The Tasks and Memos sections allow you to enter to-dos and other items in multiple fields. Tasks can be assigned priorities and types - for example, internal or client - from drop-down menus.

The Holidays section displays a calendar view of staff holidays, and it's here that managers can approve or decline staff holiday requests. Its implementation is clever: the ability to overlay existing holidays on the same calendar helps you gauge staff cover. The Attendance section cleverly uses the same technique to show who's on holiday or absent on the same calendar, and clicking on the absent person's name takes you to a summary showing their complete attendance record.

Job costing data can be entered in both the Timesheets and Expenses sections, and each can be applied to job numbers previously set up in a Job Numbers section. Like holidays, any expenses claims must await a line manager's approval.

The Contacts and Staff sections hold details of clients and internal staff respectively. It's easy enough to add new records to each through a submenu, but while Tommie claims to offer bulk loading of data from an Excel file, this didn't work through Office for Mac 2004. The developer says this is because XML isn't supported by Excel 2004, puncturing the developer's claims of platform parity.

Tommie can also generate management reports. For example, the Timesheet section can show how any staff or group spent their time, and this data can be delimited by job number or code. Similar features are available to track expenses and attendance.

Although Tommie is web-based, it felt very responsive over a broadband Internet connection. The developer has also given some thought to dealing with concerns over security and recoverability of data. Each user is allocated their own login account and access settings are determined by an admin users. Tommie is also backed by SSL encryption, data mirroring and nightly backup to two locations. Getting your data out of Tommie could prove pricey, though: the developers quote £500 to export your data onto CD in .CSV format.