Time is precious when you run your own business, and any time wasted by either yourself or your employees is wasted money – so it pays to have effective time tracking tools in place to make sure everyone is at their most productive.
Here are five of the best time tracking tools out there right now…
5 of the most effective time tracking tools
1. Toggl – free 30-day trial, then $10 – $59 a month
Toggl is one of the simplest time keeping tools on the market, featuring one-click time tracking to ensure you never lose a minute of billable time, and great reporting functionality for totally transparent billing.
Toggl can also be used across multiple devices to track time even if you’re away from the office.
2. Harvest – free 30 day trial, then $12 a month
An online tracking tool that enables you to track tasks from your computer or smartphone, with well laid out time sheets and reports that allow you to create and send invoices that accept payments with Stripe or PayPal.
Harvest also has an expense-tracking option that works with a free iPhone or Android app so you can add expenses by simply taking photo of your receipts, and a host of additional business app add-ons that cover everything from project management to accounting.
The Harvest team also provide excellent customer support.
3. Paydirt – $8 – $149 a month
Ideal for freelancers, Paydirt has a built-in one-click tracker to easily start a timer for clietns and you can create invoices from this logged time before visually editing and then sending them with customised message templates.
PayPal and Stripe integration means taking payments is quick and easy, and you can even send invoices in a range of currencies and languages.
4. ATracker – Free for the Lite version. $4.99 for the full version.
A simple to install and easy to use time tracking app for your smartphone, ATracker allows you to set up tasks with nothing more than a name and an icon, and you can get more granular with advanced settings by downloading the full version.
The main screen shows your task list and an overview of the time spent on it. You can then start or stop the clock by simply tapping on one of the tasks, making it easy to focus on the task in hand.
5. Hours – Free
Hours is one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use apps around, largely because it’s good to look at and does the basics well. Create a task, tap the start button and your task is timed until you stop the timer. All task times can then be tracked on a simple time line, but if you want more detailed charts, you’ll need to use the export function and an app like Microsoft Excel.
What time tracking tools does your business use? Share your knowledge with our community.
