Oh crap! So I’ve been using a program to keep track of my billable hours, and today while exporting all my November hours, my wife discovered it was totally missing the last day of the month in the exported .CSV file The program only exported Nov.1 to Nov.29, completely leaving out all billable work I did last Nov.30! Yikes! It would have been a $445 loss!
And she only brought it up because we had a conversation about what happened during that particular day, and she noticed on the exported spreadsheet, the work/hours I did wasn’t there!
Feeling nauseous about all the hours I missed billing all the previous months and YEARS!, I randomly checked some of my old timesheets, but don’t want to check everything (can’t bear to think of it) – but now I totally don’t trust this program anymore.
For devs here that keep track of hours (study time, billable hours, task, etc)… what program do you use? I need a program that can categorize hours by client/project/task/rate.
I’m not a working dev, so I probably have a pretty naive sense of your needs, but maybe the Pomello add on for Trello could suit you? You have to manually allocate each pomodoro session (or part thereof) to the appropriate Trello cards, and it rather annoyingly tracks time spent in ‘Pomodoros’ rather than minutes, but if you use Trello anyway and have a board for each project, it could be something to consider.
I’ve mentioned Wakatime here before, but that only tracks active minutes in your code editor - if you wanted to track consulting, planning, design and QA time that’d all have to be logged separately.
For my work we use an internal tool, but I keep track of my own personal usages using a site called toggl. https://toggl.com/
I’ve seen settings for all the things you mentioned, and I know toggle provides ways for users to monitor worker hours, pays, and other things across different projects so it might help replace your old program.
I’d also like to ask, were you using a commercial application to keep track of your billable hours, and if so what was it so we can all avoid it?
It’s called Desktop Task Timer, bought it from the AppStore several years ago. I checked and it looks like the website is still around, but hasn’t been updated since 2011, and the program isn’t found on the AppStore anymore.
I checked and reviewed some of my old timesheets and it looks like the bug isn’t consistent… Most of the months are correct, the last day being included correctly in the CSV export. But sometimes it doesnt work.
In certain cases, the last day is missing… the bug is probably related to the datepicker UI it uses when selecting/clicking the start and ending dates you want to export. So the problem was bad, but not as bad as I thought… could have been worst. Something about the position of the last day of the month within the calendar week? maybe… didn’t spend much time chasing the exact cause of the bug. Since it seems to be abandon-ware.
Right now I’m currently evaluating Tyme. I’ve evaluated another one, from Timing https://timingapp.com/, but it seems convoluted to use… plus it logs every app/browser/website that is running… heck, don’t need my Chrome/Netflix activity to show up!
I also found this page, https://blog.hubstaff.com/best-mac-time-tracking-apps/, and again, it seems most of the timetracking app nowadays wants to be subscription service! $5 to $10 or more per month! Don’t want that… I’d rather pay a one-time purchase/license price.
Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, Toggl wants $18/mo for a timesheet? seems pretty excessive to me for a timesheet…
When the whole Adobe CC Suite is only $50/mo. and the whole JetBrains All Products pack is $25/mo (and goes down to $12/mo at 3rd year).
I’m trying to avoid subscription for timesheet software.
Yea I guess the plan page is somewhat misleading. In somewhat smaller print it specifies the basic plan is always free, but shows you what seems like are the only 3 options below. So you should be fine signing up and checking it out. The UI is pretty extensive, so it takes a little getting used to. But its pretty straight forward once you know where to find everything.,
Just an update: After evaluating a few programs (some of them were too much detailed, or confusing to use or just overkill… i.e. logging every site visit or browser session!) I’ve settled on a program called Tyme2. And nice thing is it’s only a one-time payment of $23 at the Apple Store. None of that recurring monthly charge crap.
I use Timecamp
