Follow up to my Time tracking quest

So I’ve been playing around with a few options and so far it’s narrowed down to two: Harvest, and Freshbooks.

Harvest has a few really good “pros” I like that I don’t have to email the invoice to myself under the clients name in order to get access to it as a PDF. That’s huge. I also like the way the invoice looks.

The major “con”, is that it’s not free. OK OK I know, good things aren’t and you get what you pay for, which in this case seems to be a pretty good time tracking app. The other “con” for me is that I can’t have a timer. Freshbooks, has a nice little pop up that runs a javascript timer, which is pretty handy.

Freshbooks, is great in that it’s free. but it’s a huge PITA to have to put my email in for each client, and “email” them the invoice, just so I can get a PDF of it. In my work with UM, I submit an invoie through their intranet, so emailing an invoice is pointless. That’s a huge drawback.

Both apps seem to have one thing that I’ve either not figured out, or just doesn’t work like I expect. When generating an invoice from time tracked, It desn’t populate a quantity cost. Even though in freshbooks’ case the time I’m logging is against a work type with an hourly rate. WEIRD. If, when I’m in invoice mode I then select a type that has the right billable rate, it clears the description. LAME. so in both apps, i have to paste my rate in for each line item, that’s no fun.

I’m still not sure which service I’ll go with, which sucks, since that means I have to enter my time 2x, ACK, that sucks!!!

I think Harvest would be the clear winner if it wasn’t 30 bones a month.