15-Minute Reviews :: Easy Time Tracking Pro v3.0.7

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s title is Easy Time Tracking Pro version 3.0.7 by Logic Software, Inc – An application to help track your time spent on various tasks, projects and ease billing needs.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Easy Time Tracking is a powerful, yet extremely easy-to-use time management and customer billing application. Easy Time Tracking is an ideal solution for the individual contractors who need to know how much time they spent on certain tasks and how many hours they need to bill their clients for.

Your company should get a copy of Easy Time Tracking if it needs to track employees’ or contractors’ time, have the detailed statistics on who and how spends the time on one or several projects, know how profitable were the projects for a certain customer. These people will benefit greatly from using Easy Time Tracking: Software Developers, Web Designers, IT Contractors, Engineers, Accountants, Lawyers, Construction Workers, QA Specialists, Financial Advisors, Writers, Technical Support Specialists, and many others.”

Quick Pros

• Interface fairly easy to get around in
• Detail of customer-project-task handy
• Todo lists handy to help maintain what tasks are needed
• multi-user support & USB drive support

Quick Cons

• Awkward adjusting incorrect entries or adding missed entries
• Would be nice to be able to attach time to a client without building project-task
• System tray functionality isn’t intuitive enough
• Crash bug trying to alter the priority report
• Manual could have been more helpful on topics like USB support and network support (If it supports)

Expansion

Upon my first launch of this application, you’re greeted by a login screen with ‘Administrator’ highlighted, hinting already at the multi-user support. Upon passing this window, you are greeted by a fairly clean interface. Along the top are buttons to add customers, projects and tasks as well as buttons to handle the timers as well. Down the left of the window are four buttons; Timesheet, Projects and Tasks, Reports and User Management.

Under Timesheet, you can review logged time in either table mode or tree mode; Table mode is more complex to work with, but gives you a lot of filtering options. The tree mode allows you to browse the contact-project-task tree for time spent on different tasks. Unfortunately, you can’t use the tree mode to see all the entries for a project, or all entries for a client; You have to choose a task to view spent time. I found that it was awkward using the table layout to enter new entries for manual time spent or time you couldn’t log and uneasy. I feel this area of the application could be expanded further and be a little more user-friendly here; It just feels generally unpolished and awkward to use.

Under Projects and Tasks will likely be where you spend a significant amount of your time. The tree-based interface is intuitive for this page, and it is easy to alter details on this area, though I found that you could end up ‘micro-managing’ your projects too much and spending more time here than I would be comfortable; It isn’t a bad thing, there is a lot of power here. You just have to remember your primary objective with this tool is by reclaiming lost billing time, and not wasting productive time ‘tinkering’ too much. The Customer-Project-Task tree is handy for building a layout for managing the project as well, but really is a bit of a crux here too; For a smaller business which may not be this specific, you can’t just add a timer or entry to just a customer with a description; You have to add a project and task for every new customer. The to-do lists are handy to attach to the customers as well though not detailed; Another function that could be built upon, or even somehow incorporated with tasks instead.

The reports page is a little different; Here you can build 4 different reports. Summary and detailed timesheet reports, as well as summary and detailed invoice. They’re all pretty self-explanatory. The one aspect I do wish was incorporated into this application is a little more billing-friendly functionality. In reality, if I were to use this application, I would like to have some way that the application can keep track of already-billed work rather than trying to manage it based on timeframes; Maybe a report type that flags all work billed as already billed, and only pulls times that haven’t been billed already.

The final page is on user management, and is essentially to set up new users (and set up their information including the synchronization information for Easy Projects .NET, a feature I couldn’t test). It is all straightforward here, but one thing I do feel that is needed is a permissions system for whom can make new users, create reports, add clients, alter/view the timesheets and so forth. This is really a weak point of the Pro version and really needs to be evaluated further.

Besides these tabs, there is also the actual timer, as well as the system tray functionality. The timer is fairly easy to get running, but there is one flaw I feel is the ability to create a new customer-project-task right directly from this window. The same goes for the system tray. There is no quick way to add a new tree setup. Much of this, as well as previously-noted shortcomings really lean this application towards large projects instead of smaller projects like a design shop or similar; You’d end up spending a good percentage of time babysitting this application in comparison to actual productive time if you had a lot of smaller jobs.

I did come upon a crashbug as well. While I’m not going to post the body of the error here due to the sheer length of the error, I have submitted it to the developer already. When I tried to go through the settings, I attempted to change the priority settings and when I deleted my first error, it immediately gave me an error window, upon closing closed the whole application. It still deleted the entry, so I’m not sure what happened.

On a final note, I think the developer needs to work on building their site and helpfiles further. I can’t find great detail on how to set up the USB functionality listed on the website, and I can’t find any documentation within my time constraints on if placing the database on a network share will allow it to be used across the network (Which for multi-user support, I hope this is the case). While their help is useful for telling you about day to day usage of this application, many people refer to the helpfile for the advanced functionality rather than the basic functionality.

Final Verdict

This application is clearly marketed towards businesses which handle larger-scale projects; This is noted by the enforced customer-project-task layout. If you were to try to use this for a home computer consulting company or similar, I’m sure frustration may build due to the lack of flexibility. It is a good application, if its features and how they function fits your business model. For free, it may be a good title to pick up, but there is a bit of a cache-22 here; This is a business application, but Giveaway of the Day’s terms are for non-commercial usage, so it is more like a trial. There is, however, a free version which is single-user and lacks some features that single-users likely wouldn’t use anyways. Again, if you have a business which can benefit from this title and the way it is laid out, the $29.99 per seat (or less as you go up) isn’t too bad of a price; If you could reclaim one hour of billable time per license without losing productivity in the process, you would pay for this title.

My personal recommendation is FreshBooks – I use this for my business and handles all my time tracking as well as invoicing and even handles physically mailing invoices; You can even accept payments online and the customer can be involved with the process as well. You can signup here for a free account (No time limits), which allows you to service up to 3 active clients at a time; You can even disable clients to bring others in as well, which gives you some growing room before you have to move up to the first pay-for step (Which is what I did). These are affiliate links if you are curious, but I only do so because I vouch for this service and use it myself.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, September 12, 2007