If an app is no better than your own brain and the most basic computer functions, it’s not worth paying for. Not just a fancy spreadsheet or timer: By the same token, if an app didn’t offer much more than a fancy interface for manually entering the work you were doing or controlling a timer for it, we didn’t test it.The best tracking apps allow you to keep the data you generated in portable formats. Data export: Many apps tout the beautiful graphs, charts, or reports their tracking can produce, but you need to export that data to CSV if you’re going to be able to further analyze it or keep it after you stop using the service.Useful integrations: No time tracker can offer everything for everyone, but we preferred apps that offered a variety of useful hooks into commonly used apps (like Slack, Basecamp, G Suite, Office, Asana, and more) to cover more work setups.Good mobile tracking apps can control timers, show time balances, and, ideally, notify you when a timer is running unusually long or has been stopped during normal working hours. Mobile options: You probably don’t do all of your work at your computer, and sometimes you need to track things like conference calls or meetings in your off-hours or your travel time while away from your desk.Plans or pricing that work for freelancers: Since our guide is aimed at solo practitioners, we avoided apps that were priced or centered on teams or were priced like something only a corporation could afford.Some apps limit the features or scope of their trial software in a way that makes it hard to tell if it’s right for you. A free trial or limited free plan: You should be able to use the software for at least one workweek with every feature enabled, to see how it logs your work and fits into your routine.You shouldn’t be locked out of a tracking system because it only works with certain operating systems, phones, or browser extensions. Support for more than one computer platform or browser: People switch computers and platforms, sometimes of their own accord or sometimes when they switch jobs.Plenty of freelancers may have similar computer-free tasks, and a good time tracker should be able to adapt to those occasions. Even though my job as a Wirecutter writer is mostly about working at a computer, I’m sometimes building standing desks, cutting up piles of cardboard boxes, donating goods to nonprofits, or doing other work tasks not involving a screen. But we made sure that our picks would still work for offline tasks, whether you time them with a phone app or post-fill a timesheet with the app. Most of the apps we tested are aimed at those who work from a computer-writing, designing, programming, Web-based tasks, and the like. And we focused on solo practitioners instead of teams. By “freelancer,” we mean anyone who works for a client that is not their full-time employer, in nearly any field. We wanted to find the software that best allows someone to track their hours so they can then bill for them. (It even allows for recurring custom invoices and payment via PayPal + Stripe, along with a powerful native QuickBooks Online integration ).We researched, interviewed, and tested for this guide with a freelancer’s mind-set. Harvest was actually built initially as internal tool for a marketing agency to track all of their client work which has since evolved to support hundreds of thousands of users at over 70,000 companies-so with Harvest, client reporting is deeply at the core.įiguring out who is profitable, who is trending toward being over budget, and all the convenient billing/invoicing features to handle it all are all baked right in. Most people we know that use Timely for example actually disable any auto-time categorization because as explained on the Timely + Toggl pages, it's nearly impossible to attribute the auto-tracked time to actual collaborative client/project work. Their approach is more minimal in a way-versus throwing sometimes an overwhelming amount of data at you (which is intending to help you figure out what you did), actually results in a bit of overwhelm. what did you get done at each time of the day), and is more focused on simply tracking categorized chunks of time (tasks) across clients/projects. Harvest focuses less on the timeline/calendar view of time tracking (e.g. The biggest difference between Harvest and Toggl + Timely is that Harvest allows you to track time, and then spin up invoices based on the time tracked without ever leaving Harvest (with powerful invoicing/billing features).īut since we have the main category set to time tracking, lets focus on that for a moment-Harvest has a much more minimal approach to time blocking than that of Toggl and Timely.
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