Advice- time tracking and billing?

What do you use or recommend for time tracking and billing – that is really affordable?

Hi designer16, welcome to the forum.

To get any useful replies, you need to provide more information.

What have you tried that you found unsatisfactory for your needs?

What are your specific needs?

I guess that you’re talking about something like bill4time or freshbooks… but to be honest, I never used any of them so I can’t tell if they’re any good

I’ve enjoyed both Freshbooks and Xero. I use Xero now because at the time, I also needed good accounting for my self employment. At the end of the year when I close down my stuff, I may stop using Xero and move to a time/invoicing system for what little freelancing I’ll be doing.

Toggl is a good time tracker only.

To get any useful replies, you need to provide more information.

What have you tried that you found unsatisfactory for your needs?

What are your specific needs?

@Mittineague is correct - without knowing more about what you want, we’re just throwing names around to little or no effect :smiley:

When I was self-employed, I just used an Excel sheet. One sheet per FY quarter, one .xlsx file per FY. Date - Start - Stop - Start - Stop - Total, then calculated the weekly total and finally quarterly total.

Looking for suggestions on time tracking and billing… something like replicon but way more affordable. Spreadsheets take too much time and are hard to keep organized, and accounting software (xero or freshbooks) don’t fit the bill.

Hello there! You can try FreshBooks It lets you create—or import—databases of companies, contacts, and products/services. It is also easy to use. It continually improving to meet growing customer demands.

I love Freshbooks. I auto-bill my clients so I don’t have to generate time sheet invoices. I even have a client that pays me through the e-check service.

Freshbooks is pretty good, but it gets expensive. Starting at $20/month but doesn’t have the features you might need… like team timesheets etc. and the prices just gets higher and higher. You could also check out Nutcache, because it is free… but literally has no features, wouldn’t really recommend it to be honest. There is Harvest, not too bad pretty reasonable ($12/month). There is also accountsight which has the best price ($10/month). Hope that helps!!!

Freshbooks is an invoicing and time tracking app (what you’re looking for???) not accounting. Xero falls more into the accounting category, as do things like Quickbooks / QBO.

Also @designlove has a good point about pricing. Freshbooks isn’t the cheapest thing out there, nice or not (nor the most expensive, but we don’t know your budget) Harvest, another one mentioned, is also one I’ve used, and liked, so I’d recommend that too.

Good luck with your choices!

I use Toggl for all my time management, not just for work related stuff. I’ve only ever had the free version so I honestly I don’t know what the paid version does.

It comes with a mobile app with a big red start/stop button, which is nice when you need to track things away from the keyboard. One of the features I like the most is that it’ll send out a reminder email if it thinks you’ve forgotten to press stop.

The only feature I wish it had was annotation, though it does have a great tagging system. Reports are beautiful, easy to use, and exportable to CSV if you need it.

The always visible Weekly Report is awesome, and helps you manage your time in general. I use a red “Misc” label that I tap whenever I’m doing non-work related things, so I know where my time is going. This alone has helped me become more productive (that red bar in the screenie would have been 50%+ of my time a year ago!)

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Sorry about that you are right- freshbooks really is more time tracking and billing. But the point about pricing is the most important. Seems like accountsight actually might be the best option (pricing and functionality), harvest and accountsight have free trials- so we will see! Thanks everyone for the advice!

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