TOOL: Small business time tracking
Part of our continuing series on web-based tools to help your small business.
Two reviews of time tracking tools caught my eye recently, so I wanted to share them here.
The first is from Small Business CEO, Steve Rucinski, in Online Time Tracking – Simple Yet Effective .
Web-based time tracker Harvest logs you and your employees’ work hours in an easy-to-use, dynamic web application.
Great for distributed, small businesses (like Web 2.0 ventures), with Harvest you can track hours spent on multiple projects by multiple employees and subcontractors. Generate timesheets and invoice clients and view smart-looking bar charts of the tasks your people spend their time on. Harvest’s interface is very 37 Signal-esque – that is, beautiful and easy to use – and all your data is fully exportable. Sign up for a free trial to track up to 10 projects with 10 employees for 30 days. Paid Harvest plans start at $5/month for individual use
Harvest (via LifeHacker)
The second is from Natalie Ferguson, Decisive Flow, in Smarter Time Tracking with 88 Miles
A while back I wrote about Harvest, an excellent web based time tracking tool.
However, after a few weeks of using it, I noticed one small but serious flaw: I use time tracking so that I don’t have to think about how much time I spend on various projects because the tool is doing to job for me. However, Harvest requires you to write in your total hours – invariably you end up having to use scraps of paper to write down when you started and finished, then do the calculations yourself and type in the final number. For the tremendously organised or mathematical, this is a none issue, but for the likes of me, it meant giving up on time management.
UPDATE: A reader submitted this updated info:
Just want to point out that Harvest also does real-time time-tracking (this feature was released later, so perhaps it was missed in this last review).
88 Miles solves that problem. With a ‘punch in’ ‘punch out’ system, you simply click a button when you start working on a project, then click another one when you’ve finished. It does the rest for you.
88 Miles is very, very simple; you add companies, projects and then click the relevent start/finish buttons as you make your way through the workday. And this guy ‘eats his own dog food’ – 88 Miles was made to sort out his own time management issues, and he’s giving it away for free.
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
Just want to point out that Harvest also does real-time time-tracking (this feature was released later, so perhaps it was missed in this last review).
Thank you! I will update the main post with this. I’m glad you took time to point it out.
Harvest seems to be a nice tool. One more tool I want to recommend i.e Proofhub. Has time tracking, timesheets, reports and more.