Re: Time reporting

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3624

Posted by graham.smith
2005-08-02 18:55:34

I bill all my consultancy work by the hour and have used several tools for this.

Above&Beyond/TimeTo has a simple but effective method.

When you start work on an item, pressing F5 starts a timer, hitting the space bar marks the item done and stops the timer. There are also tools to pause the timer. Completed items are added using F10

You can then create reports by project and time period, that are opened in Notepad allowing the information to be copied and pasted into Excel.

Now and again I decide that this isn’t good enough and I have used more dedcicated tools such as the now defunct Time Reporter and still going Responsive Time Logger http://www.responsivesoftware.com/ this syncs with the Palm and is reasonably sophisticated allowing you to produce customised invoices, keep track of what work has been billed etc. This

And to reflect on your legal theme, I have also used Time Matters version 3 through to 6. This is without doubt the best PIM I have ever used and is an all in one time tracking tool, diary, document management tool etc etc. Again this would keep track of time and produce reports/invoices ettc It is a great program spoiled for me by bugs and poor technical support. http://www.timematters.com/

In the end I keep on coming back to A&B/TimeTo, primarily because as I said before it is still the most effective task management tool I have used and although the time tracking lacks the sophistication of the other tools I have used, it is also the easiest to keep track of and modify.

If you do get tempted by Outlook there are a few tools that run inside Outlook and use your Todo and appointment details to create time sheets. The only one I have tried is Bill Power http://www.billpower.com/billpow.htm

This seemed OK, but I never tried it in earnest.

Graham

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