Track That Time

I recently started working from home for my employer. While I kept track of my time when in the office, it became much more critical that I keep an accurate account of my days work. When you are miles away from the office, you want to be sure your employer knows you are working. Of course, there are the actual results of ones work to stand as proof that you are not just sleeping on the job. But having a list of hours to show the effort to get there is a critical added help when you do not have that daily face-time.

I tried out many time tracking tools but the one that fit the bill (no pun intended) completely was Billings 2.5 from Marketcircle.  This application allows me to easily keep track of multiple projects and switch time tracking between them, as I often switch from one project to another. The separate timer window is nice, but the timer control in the menu bar is more helpful. Although, for me, the one feature that is missing from menu bar timer is the option to have the time start tracking immediately upon switching to a new task. So, instead of switching to the task, then clicking the start/play button, it would just start timing as soon as you switched to the new task.

Billings also has a feature where you can save ‘blueprints’ of your time ‘slips’ so that it’s easy to select them for use the next time you need to do that same task but you’ve already cleared that task via invoicing. Unfortunately, these blueprint slips are not broken out via project. So, if I have 10 blueprint slips on Project A and only 1 blueprint slip under Project B, I’ll see all 11 under all projects. Makes it a little time consuming to run through them all to pick the one you need when you have a lot of blueprint slips.

Other than the two items listed above, I found this program excellent and went ahead and happily paid the $59 registration fee. The reporting and invoicing features are very strong and very customizable. Currently, since I am using this for my employer, I am not actively using the invoicing feature, but I have tested it and have seen what it can do. I use the reporting feature to submit my weekly activity reports.

This is a must have application if you are a freelancer and need to track your time and/or invoice clients. Give it a try at www.billings2.com!