Time & Billing, WEB 2.0 Style!

I've been a consultant for 20 years now and one of the most important parts of my job is actually to keep track of time spent on projects. A lot of times, my paycheck is tied to this task. However, even when it's not, I've always liked to keep track of "time" to give me an idea of where my days go. Every year or two, I "look around" for a better way to track time. I have used many products over the years, some good, some bad. It seems like it is time for this search once again.

However, this time, my expectations have changed a lot. For one, the Internet is "totally here" and web 2.0 is actually more like web 3.0 by now. Whereas before, I would have never dreamed of keeping my data "in the cloud", now it's my primary requirement. I need to be able to log time from anywhere, quickly and efficiently with or without a computer. Also, my data has to be "safe" and backed up for me with little effort.

How, you may ask? Well, with my iPhone of course!

But first a little background. If you know me at all, you also know that 2 years ago I fell in love with the iPhone. I left my trusty Palm Treo (the best smart phone before iPhone) for the unproven Apple device. I am glad to report that I have not looked back once. The iPhone is truly a revolutionary device and it has changed the game for smart phones dramatically. I know that BlackBerry people think they are "it", but I beg to differ. See, what made my Palm Treo so useful to me was that if I needed to do something on the device, chaces were an app had been written by someone for that very task and I could buy it for maybe $20! I had many apps that I could simply not live without! I am sorry to say that this is just not the same with BlackBerry. Yes, there are apps, but I am sorry there are 50 times that many app for iPhone. (Unfortunately, Palm Treo is dead... and Palm is trying to regain their fame with the new Palm Pre, but I just don't see it happening.)

So, this time around, as for time tracking, my most important requirement was that the application had to work on the iPhone. This is when I turned to Google, of course.

First on the list was a great article reviewing 5 iPhone time tracking apps. You can read it at http://theappleblog.com/2009/02/04/time-tracking-via-the-iphone-5-apps-reviewed/. Although I liked the application TimeWerks and agreed with the author about the other apps, I did not feel my search was done. Also, this article did not cover the "Jobs" app that apple has actually pushed via it's iPhone commercials. Both apps, although very complete, lacked a true WEB 2.0 feel to me because neither had a "web" counterpart. Most importantly, they were both good and sufficient perhaps, but backup of my data worried me. Although they both provided a way to backup your data, each one required me to take a step in order to backup, in essence "sending" my data somewhere else whenever I felt it necessary.

However, thanks to the magic of Google, two or three more links down on the list, there was a hidden gem. A link to http://freshbooks.com/. Freshbooks is actually a service more than an application. Yes, they have a time tracking application for iPhone, but their business is mainly a web based service that you subscribe to on a monthly basis. They definitely handle time tracking for projects, but there's actually more, a lot more.

I did not set out looking to automate my invoices or even issue invoices from an iPhone application. Even I recognize that there are some things you don't want to do on an iPhone and creating, editing and sending client invoices is one of those! However, FreshBooks does both project time tracking AND invoice management in one clean interface that is efficient and easy to use. In a matter of a few painless hours, I had all my current clients added to the system, current projects setup and even recurring invoices (that are always my monthly torture) all setup and "working". I know even have a portal where clients and contractors can see their accounts and even issue payments to me online!

I certainly found a lot more than I was looking for or expecting with the Fresh Books service!

I did sign up for the lowest level of plan, but at $14 per month, it's really a non-cost, certainly considering the amount of monthly work this system has now eliminated for me! For a company my size, this level is sufficient though I recognize that larger companies may need to pay a bit more. For solo consultants, there is a free level, although somewhat limited in the number of clients you could setup.

Still, if you are a consultant or you bill for your time, you definitely want to look at Fresh Books as your possible solution. You will not be sorry you did!