Time Tracking Review

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.