Time Tracking

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.

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Monday, July 7th, 2008 Business, Consulting, Mac, Technology, Web Development, Work, iPhone Comments

Time tracking and billing, whatchu usin

I think Sean Corfield asked this question a while back, I remember following it with interest. Now it’s my turn to bring it up again. I’ve been using my home grown solution for years. I really like it, but in moving servers and such, it’s had problems. The admin section doesn’t work since the stored procs no longer exist. It’s entirely CF which I just don’t do much of any more, so maintenance is tedious. Plus I need a windoze box when I need to do any SQL work since the DB is MS SQL.

All that said, I really like it and use it daily to track my time and invoice for it.

I’d like to find something new though. I don’t have many requirements really. I want to be able to generate PDFs. Enter time by client/project. Report on time spent by project or in total by week and month. Lastly, be accessible. My current solution is on my web server so I can get to it on any machine. I have .mac so something that uses a flatfile or whatever, would be just fine.

I’ve tried Billings, it’s ok. What I don’t like is that sharing across X machines isn’t built in. so the solutions are pretty hacky. It also isn’t easy to update invoices. Sometimes you need to update an entry, take something out, whatever. Billings doesn’t really do that very well.

I also tried freshbooks.com. It solves the accessable problem, even has third party tools for widgets and apps to enter data through, should I not want to use the website. The one thing I really don’t like is that I can’t just generate an invoice that I’d email to a client. I can email one from the site, which then gives me a PDF, but by then the client has it. That’s ok but right now I’m working with Universal Mind, and their system supports me uploading my invoice, not emailing it to some one.

What else is out there? I’m contemplating just sucking it up and fixing up my tool, but I’ve got a few other projects that my wife would like done first :) so I’d like something I can just use more or less out of the box.

Freshbooks is still in the running. I’ll be using it tomorrow to track time and see what I think. Oh and in case it wasn’t clear, it needs to be Mac friendly. Windoze only tools need not apply.

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Friday, June 6th, 2008 Consulting, I am a Consumer, Mac, Technology Comments

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