Easy, Powerful Time Tracking with OfficeTime

Posted by Bill Weakley on 08/8/08 in Featured, Office, Utilities

I am not very good about keeping timesheets. When I’m billing clients, I often cut my billable hours short because of gaps in my time tracking. My boss likes to know how many hours I’m spending on projects each week, but I can’t get motivated to use the Excel spreadsheet we have for logging projects. But OfficeTime has had a profound effect on my timekeeping. I started off with the 2-minute quickstart tutorial, and was up to speed in no time. Now I know where my time goes and why. Now I see when my peak-efficiency times are during the day. Now keeping track of my hours is almost fun.

So just what is OfficeTime? At its simplest, OfficeTime is a time tracking application. Keep track of your time on various projects, whether you charge for your time or not. When you begin work on a project (called a work session), you start the timer, and you stop it when you finish. It’s that simple! Of course, there are many more features, yet the software stays completely out of your way while you’re working, and you can make changes to times or projects easily via the Menu Bar icon, without having to leave your current application.

Basically, there are 6 things you should know to really use OfficeTime effectively. The good news is that you have an idea about all of them already, so this is more like a refresher list. You can have multiple windows open, each with its own project, if you want. I usually keep one window open and toggle the project via a drop-down menu in the window. You can avoid windows if you like by using the Menu Bar icon to handle most time-related tasks. A category can be broad like “Consulting,” but I find it more useful to break down consulting projects into the respective companies or people I work for. Categories make it fast and easy to keep projects grouped together, and provide for some very powerful filtering and reporting options. Projects are the large to-do items on your list, like a website redesign or an article you’re writing. Sessions are the smaller pieces of the project, like research, interviews, phone calls, tech support, travel time, writing, editing, etc. Expenses are costs associated with your project that don’t fall into billable-by-time costs, such as travel, materials, and purchases. And you can get reports on just about anything.

The software is designed with the busy worker in mind, so you can download and install the software, add a few projects, and be tracking your time in mere minutes. Then, as you grow accustomed to recording your time spent on different projects, you’ll want more features, and OfficeTime is ready with tons of features including customizable reports, invoicing and payment tracking, and even tracking multiple people, which is very handy for managers. OfficeTime works on both Mac and Windows machines, so you can play nicely with your co-workers in a typical office. You can synchronize your sessions with iCal and share those calendars with others, which is handy if your boss is often popping in to check on you—they can just look at your progress online or subscribe to your OfficeTime calendar.

And finally, one of the best features of OfficeTime is the developers themselves. As you can see, if you visit their website, they have fun writing software, and they really want to make OfficeTime the easiest, most useful software you’ve ever used. They take customer suggestions very seriously, and if they can add a feature without interfering with the ease-of-use, they will.

OfficeTime costs $47 from Transcena Design Ltd., with a 120-day money back guarantee and a 21 day full-featured trial. In a matter of weeks, it will pay for itself in time savings and more accurate time reporting.

del.icio.us tag this | digg this | permalink | ping

10 Comment(s)

Legend:

Guest

Article Author

Contributor

Peter Craddock said on

August 8th, 2008 at 6:22 am

I was actually trying to find a time tracking app for my father a few months back, and stumbled upon OfficeTime. The main plus regarding OfficeTime is that iCal integration, which (believe me) very few other time tracking apps offer.
And it’s really easy to use.

My father took to OfficeTime right away. Easy to learn, simple to use. And it’s powerful.

The others I found with iCal integration didn’t even come close.

Time Tracking said on

August 8th, 2008 at 8:58 am

TSheets is another great time tracking package that will work on both Mac and PC. TSheets is easy to use, and has a mac widget and an iPhone app.

-3

Adam Thorsen said on

August 8th, 2008 at 9:31 am

this has been a favorite of mine for a while. Very easy to make professional looking invoices.

(subscribed to comments) Add karma

Chad Crowell said on

August 8th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

A simpler version of this, for free is Time Tracker.

John said on

August 8th, 2008 at 4:29 pm

Also check out Intervals, a more comprehensive web-based time tracking tool that works beautifully on the Mac.

-1

Bill Weakley said on

August 8th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

The problem, as I see it, with both TSheets and Intervals, is that both require an annual subscription, while OfficeTime is a one-time expense. After a year, you will have paid much more for those two than you would for OfficeTime. Also, you have to house your client/payment data off-site. This gets into the realm of whether those two sites are PCI-compliant (authorized to house such data), which can be a big headache. I prefer to keep my data on my computer and encrypted, personally.

Dan Gebhardt said on

August 14th, 2008 at 5:59 pm

Hi Bill,

I’d like to address some of your concerns about TSheets and Intervals, which are often raised about Software as a Service (SaaS) in general. When we built the time tracking service LiveTimer, we realized that people would have these concerns and tried to meet them head on.

First of all, I understand what you’re saying about the potential risk to housing your data offsite. That’s why LiveTimer users can download complete backups of their account’s data and can even restore their accounts from those backups. Furthermore, we use 256-bit SSL to secure all communication between browsers and our servers.

Also, don’t forget about the potential advantages to using SaaS. There’s no need to set up and maintain a server yourself, which may not be an issue for a freelancer using OfficeTime, but it can become an issue for a team of any size that wants to share data. Furthermore, SaaS allows you to access the same data from multiple devices without the need for synchronization. For instance, LiveTimer works with any modern browser as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch. Since your site focuses on Mac applications, you may also be interested to see how LiveTimer has been optimized to run with Fluid to provide desktop-integrated time tracking on the Mac.

Last but not least, I think that comparing the costs of SaaS vs. installed software can be an apples to oranges comparison. The advantages I mentioned above make costs hard to compare. Also, installed software is rarely a one time cost when you consider upgrades, licensing terms regarding multiple installations or users, etc. (Please note, I’m not saying anything about OfficeTime’s license in particular, but speaking generally). Anyway, with all that said, we’ve tried to keep LiveTimer’s pricing very reasonable at only $5 per user per month.

Sorry for the length of my reply, but I felt I should provide some counterpoints to your post about the expense and security of SaaS. Thanks for hearing me out!

Dan Gebhardt
Co-Founder
LiveTimer.com

(subscribed to comments) Add karma

Daniel McCullum said on

August 16th, 2008 at 3:45 pm

Sorry, but this app is just plain fugly… One of the main reasons that the Mac is a better platform than Windows is the generally standard and beautiful UI. This app is trying to reinvent the UI concept, and fails miserably.

-1

Jeffrey McPheeters said on

August 19th, 2008 at 12:47 pm

I’ve been using Office Time for a couple of years with great success. I was able to keep my records synced between my desktop and when I’m using a laptop by using DropBox and a symlink to keep the data synced between them when I move from one to the other. Now that I have an iPhone, I’ve been looking for something with a ‘push’ type ability. Live Timer looks nice, but it 1) needs a thin client, like Evernote uses, and 2) it needs the ability to have more than one timer running concurrently.

It’s very common for me to be tracking some tasks that work in the background or on other computers that don’t require my direct attention, while also recording time spent coding, etc. So I need the ability to keep more than one timer going at a time. Office Time does this quite well.

If Office Time could come up with an iPhone client to record in the field and then download the data later; OR if Live Timer had the ability to do multiple timers using a thin client type of app locally, that would then sync to the ‘cloud’, THAT could be a killer tool.

(subscribed to comments) Add karma

Dan Gebhardt said on

August 19th, 2008 at 5:13 pm

@Jeffrey McPheeters - Thanks for sharing your thoughts about LiveTimer. We will definitely consider your request to allow multiple timers to run simultaneously. Honestly, I didn’t know there was much demand for this feature, but we’ve now had several requests for it, so we may implement it as an option.

It would also be possible for us, or anyone for that matter, to develop a thin client that syncs with LiveTimer using our API. As I mentioned in my comment above, Fluid works well to integrate LiveTimer with your Mac desktop. However, it of course will not work offline, which I’m guessing is the reason for your request.

We’re very actively working to improve LiveTimer. Any comments and suggestions are welcomed, and very much appreciated, at support AT livetimer DOT com. Thanks!

(subscribed to comments) Add karma