Jackrabbit Mobile Playbook: Operations, Administration, Finance, HR

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Jackrabbit Mobile

Published in

Don't Panic, Just Hire

6 min readJul 17, 2016

Operations, Administration, HR

We strive to find an effective balance between process and practicality. We strive to eliminate bureaucracy, politics, red tape, and redundancy. When in doubt: keep things simple, do what works, and work with your team.

Remote Meetings

Remote meetings are usually held over Google Hangouts, where we can video conference with multiple people, chat, and screen share when needed.

You can create a new Google Hangout in a Slack channel or message by typing “/hangout”. On a Google calendar invite, you can select to include a link for a Google Hangout. Hangout links can also be shared by URL.

Phone meetings are usually held with Uberconference. It creates a dedicated conference line for your account. It also integrates with Google Hangouts, and you can create a conference number for others to call into a Hangout.

Chat

We use Slack for company chat.

Email

We use Gmail for company email.

Wiki

We have an internal Wiki for company information.

Documents

We use Google Docs for our documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.

They are great for real-time collaboration with others on a document. They have comments and suggestions features, manage edits and revision history, and automatically save. They are easy to share by URL. They can be exported and downloaded into different formats, such as PDF or Microsoft Office formats. Those formats can also be uploaded to Google Drive and converted to Google Doc format.

We store everything in Google Drive.

Calendars, Scheduling, and Meetings

We use Google Calendar for company calendars. The “Find a Time” feature is handy for finding a common available time.

Team members have access to coworkers calendars by default. There are also Jackrabbit calendars for Vacation Days and Holidays.

Team members are generally available between 9am-5pm, but we allow flexible schedules that enable our people to choose the times that they do their best work. Set your normal working hours in Google Calendar. Mondays and Thursdays are typically meeting days, while Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are typically workdays (also known as maker days). If a time slot is available, it is safe to assume that the person is free and available for a meeting, although be very respectful of each other’s time.

We don’t hold meetings for the sake of holding meetings, and most work can happen remotely and asynchronously. We encourage few meetings in favor of better work.

Each conference room has an associated calendar for reserving it. The way to reserve them is explained on the Office page.

Holidays

Jackrabbit observes the following holidays every year. If a holiday lands on a weekend, then we will be closed on the next closest day. For example, if on a Saturday we will be closed Friday, and if on a Sunday we will be closed Monday.

Good Friday
Memorial Day
Independence Day
Labor Day
Thanksgiving Day
Day after Thanksgiving
Christmas Day
New Year’s Eve
New Year’s Day

The Jackrabbit Office is also closed for SXSW! We’ll be running around downtown Austin, presenting and attending awesome conference sessions with thought leaders, learning about cutting edge trends in the industry, meeting incredible people from all around the world, and having an amazing time!

All-Hands Meetings

All-Hands meetings are informative meetings held twice per week on Mondays and Thursday, from 10–11am and attended by everyone in the company. The agenda is found in the Team Meeting Agenda in Asana and there is a Google Hangout link in the Calendar Invite. On Mondays team members demo work to the rest of the company, such as a new feature or design that was implemented, and on Thursdays we share status updates and company reports, such as sales and recruiting.

Time Tracking

We track our time in Harvest.

All work time should be tracked in a Harvest category. Customer work should be tagged to that customer. Non-customer work should be tagged to Jackrabbit Internal. Jackrabbit Extracurricular is used to tag time that is not part of your core responsibilities, but contributes to your growth and expertise in the industry, such as organizing our Austin iOS Developer or Austin Android Developer Meetups.

Project managers are responsible for creating, managing, and monitoring the Harvest projects. They will set the appropriate project settings according to the terms of the Statement of Work, such as dates, budget, and invoicing schedule.

It’s very important to keep accurate track of time, including all billable and nonbillable, internal and external. These are used to track company operations and forecast future plans. Time records are used in legal and financial reporting.

Weekly timesheets should be submitted by Monday at Noon for the previous week. Project Managers should approve, deny, or respond to submitted timesheets for their projects by Monday end of day.

Finances

We have a bookkeeper and CPA that manages our finances and accounting, who can be reached at our finance email address.

We manage our finances with QuickBooks, including financial reports, invoicing customers, and paying bills. We use Harvest for project and time tracking.

Invoicing

We invoice our customers every sprint for the work completed over the past sprint.

Our invoicing terms are Net-21. Late payments are subject to a late fee.

Invoices can be paid via Bank Transfer or Check for no fee, or through Credit Card or PayPal for a processing fee.

Invoice reminders are automatically sent to customers one week, and one day, before the due date.

Payments

Vendors and contractors should email invoices to Finance. Invoices should be formatted and include an invoice number, date range, work details, rate, and total. Here’s an invoice template PDF.

We process bills and payments twice per month, on the 1st and 15th. Payments can be sent through PayPal (for a processing fee), Paychex Direct Deposit (our preferred method), or Chase Bill Pay mailed check.

Direct deposit can be set up by completing the Paychex Enrollment form found on this page and submitting to Finance. A voided check, deposit slip, or bank specification form is required.

Payroll is processed on the 1st of each month for the previous month and is deposited within 2–3 business days.

Everyone can access their pay stubs and reports through Paychex Flex.

Expenses

Company expenses should be pre-approved by a Partner. Project expenses should be pre-approved by a project manager. Receipts should be submitted to Finance and will be reimbursed on the next payment or payroll.

Office

The Jackrabbit Office is located in downtown Austin, on West 6th Street. Contact us if you’d like to come visit!

Community

Community involvement is one of our values, and part of our mission of building awesome tech with awesome people is connecting with those people. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, and it’s something that we’d each be doing even if we weren’t working at Jackrabbit.