Managing your hourly time with a time tracker as a freelancer is one of the most important things you can do. With the freedom of setting your own hours comes the responsibility of keeping up with things without oversight.
If you manage a team of employees or contractors, this task becomes even more of a challenge. When it comes to billing your clients however, they aren’t concerned about your problems, they just want an accurate invoice. As a freelancer you are probably on the move a bit. If you manage other contractors remotely, this issue becomes accentuated. Without having a punch-clock on the wall that employees can physically walk past and clock in and out with, how can you keep track of everyone’s time?
What Is actiTIME?
Enter actiTIME, a web-based time tracker that offers a lot of functionality to meet the needs of either the solopreneur or a team of players connected only by the signal that brings the web to your home or office. actiTIME is more than just a time tracker though. It also offers project management, invoicing, and integration with Quickbooks.
How Does It Work?
- actiTIME gives you two options for how you host the software. You can either download the program to your own machine, or you can have them host it on their servers and use it as SaaS (software as a service).
- For the single freelancer and small teams, actTIME offers a free Small Team Edition. The functionality is basic only, but extra features can be added as you need them. For larger teams, the price is $2 per user/month for the SaaS version and a one-time $3 per user for the downloadable version. They also offer a 30 day free trial, which comes with data plugged in already to help you understand everything quickly.
- Time Tracking – Enter comments with times, lock the timesheet after approval to prevent future modifications, manage time off and overtime, and do it all from your iPhone as well through an app.
- Reports – the reporting module really includes a ton of information and is highly customizable, as you can see in the screenshots below. Various performance and time tracking reports are available, as well as billing, cost, profit/loss, and more. This section of the software adds quite a bit to the robust functionality.
- Having project management and task management built in to the program rather than having to use a separate piece of software is a big plus here. The integration makes your entire experience much more complete and adds a lot to the reporting, making the time tracker portion one piece of a bigger and better solution
- Even more integration comes from extensions you can add on. You can generate nice looking invoices with your company logo, integrate with Quickbooks for seamless accounting, calculate work costs and review the project revenues.
Things We Loved
- The thing I loved most about actiTIME was the fact that it seems to be a complete solution at a very affordable price (especially the free version!)
- The software is very easy to use, especially when compared to some other comparable time tracker software
- The fact that an individual and small team can use the basic software for free is amazing considering how good it is. Even the full suite for large teams is very affordable.
Things We’d Love to See in the Future
- Support for more languages would be a nice addition, as right now the software is only available in English
- Often, manual entry of time is the better way to go, but it would be great if there were a feature added for real-time clocking that allowed users to “clock-in” and out. There are occasions for certain organizations when this option would be a big help.
Who is actiTIME for?
actiTIME is a great time tracker and project management solution for almost any freelancer or small team. Actually, I can’t even think of anyone in these groups that wouldn’t benefit greatly from this software. Since there is both the free edition and a 30 day free trial on the others, I highly recommend checking this out if you have been looking for a good solution for time tracking and more.
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