So with consulting comes the process of recording your time, and then invoicing that time or at least recording it against a  job or customer as un-billable so you know how to improve your time management or estimation skills.

So in light if this I’ve been on the hunt to find a halfway decent time management package, software, app or even just a hastily put together php web app linked to a DB.  At first I thought this would be a relatively easy task, how wrong I was. It seems there’s nothing particularly suitable out there, although admittedly I didn’t go as crazy as trying SAP and the like. I did take a look at a few pieces of software and apps for the Android.

My basic requirements were that it had to be web/cloud based or at least some syncing mechanism. I’m working a lot more from my phone now and the ability to update time on the go is a must. My only other real must have is the ability to export or display a report of time logged by customer/project. The other nice to have, recording time and $s by day or by hour; some jobs are consulting for a “whole day” at a fixed rate others are ad-hoc per hour billing, and if it was able to produce any reports automatically on some sort of time schedule.

After looking at several options I settled on an App called Timesheet (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unidevsolutions.timesheet&hl=en) which was the best fit although still not ideal. It does work very well for recording time against projects/customers and you can export or email a .csv file of the time, although the report is a little ugly it gets the job done. You can also add a $ rate per customer however you can’t differentiate between hourly and daily rates, in fact you can’t really track a whole day, just hours worked. It also lacks the ability to automate the monthly reporting of time so you have to remember to export or email the .csv at the end of the month but that’s not too bad.

Of the other apps/software I looked at I must admit what turned me off a few was the cost. I might be being a tight-ass but I can’t see the value in paying $200-300 a year to record time, especially added to the fact anything with a free trial I did test and it failed or required a lot of customizing or workaround. For my mind if  one product costs more than another you want it to offer some extra value and most were no better than the free stuff out there, although I do suspect some of the monthly costs would be paying for hosting.

All in all it seems there’s a big gap in the market for a decent time-keeping solution and the irony is if I had more time I probably would knock up that php page and a DB that could probably do what I needed.

 

– Luke