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Review – OfficeTime 1.3 for Mac

OfficeTime is a lightweight application to help you track time spent projects, big or small. Complete with a full suite of reports to let you see where your time goes, and an easy to use fully editable template invoicing system, OfficeTime will handle most time sensitive applications with ease.

One of my biggest issues in running my own small business, is tracking my time without spending a lot doing so. I am sure we have all been there when the door bell rings and you just know it’s UPS bringing you that long awaited eBay purchase. Chances are you would forget to make a note of the time you step away from your computer, or forget to manually stop the timer. This brings us to a few pro’s about OfficeTime.

Pros

OfficeTime knows when you stop using your computer and will automatically make a note of your time of departure. When you return a few minutes later, a friendly note will ask if you wish to subtract the time away from your computer from the current project, keep the time away from your computer on the current project, or add the time away from your computer to another project. This can be especially useful if you wish to keep track of your interruptions. Each time segment also has a place to enter concise notes, or lengthy documentation of what was done during that time span.

To start a new timer for the currently selected project, simply click the space bar.

Projects can be grouped by category, with each category having its own pay scale. One category can have $100 an hour, another can have $0 an hour.

On some projects you may need to share your times with iCal, which you can then share through the use of webdav or me.com. OfficeTime makes it easy to have certain projects automatically sync up with iCal. OfficeTime also lets you import your times from iCal.

OfficeTime includes a simple but effective and powerful invoicing system. From the report settings, you choose the projects, employees and categories you want in an invoice and click on ‘Make Invoice’. That’s it. The invoices are templated, and easily modified using just TextEdit. The default template will produce a second page with all the details of the work that you have done. This has been a huge hit with my clients, and has greatly reduced the amount of time I spend explaining to the client what I worked on.

If you are an Excel buff, no worries there either. You can export your times directly into Excel, complete with notes.

The built in reports complete with a nice colourful pie chart will let you quickly see how much time you wasted this week on playing video games, or talking on the phone. A click of a button will let you display daily, weekly or monthly sub-totals, with percentage of time spent by project, category or employee.

The only area I have not tested extensively is the Employee time tracking. You can have employees and import their times from their copy of OfficeTime into your OfficeTime. This would be great to make sure your billing is accurate on projects that require more than just one person.

As far as learning how to use the application goes, there really is no learning curve. Once installed, you can have your first project running within a few minutes. Adding additional projects is just as easy, and getting reports of all the projects is again, fast and easy.

OfficeTime has two nice visual aids to assist in time tracking. The dock icon will show the current time spent on a project in a nice little red badge. OfficeTime also includes a menu item at the top of your screen which will show the current time spent on a project. Clicking on the drop down in the menu bar will allow you to select different projects to start recording time for, without the need to go to the application.

Cons

As much as I like OfficeTime, there is one thing that drive me quite mad. Most aggravating to me is the quirky Start Stop button in the timer window. Clicking on it sometimes starts the timer, and sometimes it starts and stops it right away. There have been occasions when I thought I was safely timing my work, only to discover the timer was blank.

If you live in Canada and use the invoices in OfficeTime, you will see a distinct lack of dual compound taxes. Which is a bit strange, since the developer is in Canada.

The interface over all is very nice, but a bit rough around the edges in some places, and is less than perfectly Mac like. This takes a little bit of getting used to.

Strangely enough, OfficeTime cannot see you when you are working in a Terminal window. As I sometimes spend hours at a time in a terminal window, I must continually tell the timer, that yes, I am really working, and add the time away from my machine to the current project.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking for a small application to help you accurately track the time you spend on projects, then look no further. OfficeTime is rich on features and has a clean interface that is remarkably easy to use. For months I searched for and tried various time tracking software packages. Nothing compares to OfficeTime.

In case you are wondering, I paid full price for my version of OfficeTime, and have written this review entirely on my own without the developers asking me write it.