Our next review will be Replicon Time Tracking
We have begun our review of Replicon Time Tracking – we should have it be ready in about a week.
Zoho Time Tracking – The good, the bad, and the useful
Full Disclosure: while I am an avid user of the Zoho CRM product, I am not a paid (or avid) user of Zoho Time Tracking, which is a subset of Zoho Invoicing.
Zoho Time Tracking scores a 7/10
Summary: It’s not bad – it’s intended to be more of an add-on to their invoicing product than a stand-alone time tracking product. While it does feature a stopwatch type feature, the program is not based around the stopwatch model. I found Zoho Time Tracking useful and functional, but I also found interface bland and it did not inspire the relative joy (for a time tracking product) that Freckle inspires. It does include iPhone and Android versions, which I was not able to test (I’m one of the select few with a Windows Phone 7).
The desigens did not design Zoho Time Tracking to be a mindless push button type of product, but instead to require some deliberation to use. Not much, mind you, but some. I found that to be my main gripe with the product. As time tracking is a “necessary evil” product mindless button pushing becomes a much more important feature than one would otherwise expect. I liked the tie-in to Zoho Invoicing and if you are an existing Zoho Invoicing user I would use Zoho Time Tracking.
Pictured left is their main time entry window. It’s not bad, and it works, but it doesn’t induce a craving to use it. That’s a lot to ask of a web app, but considering that time tracking is a necessary evil, a craving to to do the right thing is a good thing.
The Highlights
I liked the ability to assign different rates to different tasks to different people. This would be helpful to keep track of certain things which are not billable (by setting the rate to zero), but still associated with the product. Including zero sum line items to an invoice would be a nice way to remind an ongoing client the time cost of meetings for example.
Invoicing
The tie-in to invoicing the true strength of the product – see the screen shots below for more details.
I found creating an invoice to be as simple as clicking a link.
I liked the “Bill Up To” feature. This would be handy with most of my hourly clients.
The invoice populates itself for the most part.
Sending the invoice is simple. I don’t know why the description is not in an html editor (like the rest of the web these days) but it does work.
Being able to see a customer’s history is nice, it’s not tied to the time tracking portion, but it would be handy.
I often forget who I have sent nag emails to, so this “Email History” feature would be nice.
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What I Would Change about Zoho Time Tracking
Alphabetical listings on the main task window
For whatever reason this is not chronological, but alphabetical – no idea why.
Snail mailing of invoices
I could not get this work due to some error in the “Customer Country” field.
Conclusion
Overall I found the time tracking feature to be adequate, not spectacular. What was spectacular about Zoho Time Tracking was the integration with Zoho Invoicing. If you are already a Zoho user, or if you are well served by the Zoho Invoice features, I would use Zoho Time Tracking. If not, then I use a dedicated time tracking service, like Freckle Time Tracking.
Sign up for Zoho Invoicing here
Our next review will be Zoho
Just FYI – we have begun our next review, which will be Zoho Invoicing. We should have enough data in a week or two.
Update: 10-18-2011- We finished! Read the review of Zoho Time Tracking.
Freckle Time Tracking
Freckle Time Tracking Scores 8/10
Full Disclosure: I signed up for Freckle Time Tracking in January of 2011 and have profited from the service ever since.
The home page of Freckle Time Tracking.
Summary: I like and enjoy Freckle. I first discovered the product while listening to this TechZing interview with Amy Hoy and had to give her product a try.
I find the interface to be intuitive, easy to use and well designed. Freckle stays focused on tracking time and does not let natural offshoots (like invoicing or reporting) get in the way. I found the initial setup to be minimal as well; I simply entered a name and pressed a start button, and Freckle took it from there.
What do you learn from tracking your time? Why bother with tracking time at all? I learned this: after about a month of using Freckle Time Tracking I compared my best guesses of project duration to the actual data (from Freckle) and the results horrified me. Some projects took twice to three times as long as I thought, and I had not charged the client for the overage!. Small, 15-30 tasks tend to escape my mental accounting but they add up fast. Freckle caught my errors and showed me the true picture. As a result of that little experiment I no longer offer those smaller services and no one has complained (or paid less).
The Highlights
The Timer Window
The timer window
I spend about 90% of my time with Freckle with the Timer window. I find it to be simple, intuitive, informative with blessedly few options. It contains a simple list of projects, along with start, pause, and save buttons. You can also supply your tags here when you save the project. It opens in a properly sized window from a bookmarklet they supply. The Freckle Team wisely decided not to clutter up their main action space with needless eye candy and instead concentrated on perfecting making the small details and actions.
Tagging
Tag window
Freckle uses tags in useful ways. The tags do a nice job of letting you keep track of what you’ve done in a nice standardized way. I can see this being useful in splitting up work between partners (i.e. someone should be making phone calls, someone else should be fixing bugs, etc. The tags do a nice job of telling your the composition of projects: how much time people spent on phone calls, how much on email, and so on.
Minimalist Project Settings
Project options screen
I also liked the small number of options they give you to categorize projects. I find it easy to slice, dice, and categorize to infinity, but the Freckle team has done a nice job of separating the meaningful from the trivial. They also have the wonderful ability to bill in different minute increments, which I find to be useful for disruptive clients, as well as those who demand a lot of context-switching.
Tufte-esque status indicators
The Project List
They do a nice job of using small numbers of pixels to convey a lot of information.
Project Reporting
Project Detail Page
The project page (where I thought I would spend a most of my time, but don’t) contains nothing but simple and direct information. Indeed, this page could even be trimmed a bit and would lose nothing in my opinion. I imagine the designers intended for this page to be used by the supervisor of multiple people who wonders why his team can’t get anything done.
The Pulse
The Pulse
I find their “Pulse” view interesting – I have not seen a better way of showing your your work day. The pie charts convey information well, (the size varies with the number of hours) and do not junk up the screen.
Verbal Clarity
One other fine thing to mention – the writing on both their public site conveys information in a clean and concise manner. You can’t get enough of that these days.
What I Would Change
The API
Overall I found the API to be nice, fast and responsive with the option of getting results in both json and xml. However the end user cannot filter/query by time entry date or modified date, which results in a lot of extra data getting pushed over the wire. Most people do not care about APIs, but I’m building a profitability analysis / client profiling web application and I would like a few more options.
Adding a new project from the timer window
A user can add a new project from the timer window easily, but Freckle put the new project deep into your alphabetical list (which can get quite long, see below) and you have to dig for it in the listing of projects. I would like the new project to rise to the top of the Timer window (like currently timed projects), along with the other recent or active projects.
No ability to remove a project from the timer window without deleting it
As someone who divides work up into a lot of projects, both internal and external, it would be nice to mark a project as “Complete” and remove it from the time list, while still being able to review it later. At the moment one cannot do that.
Their invoicing offering
No specific suggestions here, I’m just not impressed enough to want to use it. Granted, they have not released it from beta, so that might change over time.
Conclusion
I recommend it highly – if you depend in any way on time tracking in your work then Freckle will save you money in the first few days. So start saving money and time now.
Our goals
We intend to review online time tracking services – starting with the big names, like Freckle, Basecamp, Replicon and Toggle.
For the purposes of full disclosure – TimeTrackingReview.com is a subsidiary of ProfitAwareness.com – which is a profitability analysis service. It’s like Mint.com for freelancers!. Why would a profitability analysis service have a time tracking review site? Well, we intend to support every online time tracking service we can find – so it only makes sense to review them as we find them. (ProfitAwareness imports data from online time tracking service and parse the data into something meaningful, like who your biggest clients are, and which ones are your actual profitable clients.)
