Tracking the time you spend working is something many of us need to do, whether we like it or not. For people like freelancers, tracking time is an essential part of the job in order to aptly bill your client later on. And in all different industries, time sheets are used to clock in and out of a job (and if you’ve ever watched The Simpsons, you’ll know how this can be exploited!).
TSheets is essentially a virtual timesheet, allowing you to track your time on the web, whatever the context. If you’re in a position to do so, you can also manage the time of your employees and produce reports that directly integrated into services like QuickBooks and FreshBooks.
Getting Started
Once you’ve setup an account with TSheets, it’s best you go through the Setup Wizard to get started. In this process, you’ll assign yourself to a specific industry (how this helps, I’m not sure), and choose whether to include the option of paid time off. You’ll also setup job codes, which can be anything including just the name of individual projects and/or clients. In addition to job codes, you’ll also define some PTO codes/descriptions, which will be used when assigning paid time off to yourself.
Once that’s done, you’ll be launched into your TSheets dashboard with your time card open. You can immediately clock into the job by hitting the “clock in” button associated to the particular project/client/job that you’re about to start work for. This will start a timer showing the length of time you’ve been working for the task, the day and the week. If needed, you can also assign notes to the time sheet, which can be useful.
When it’s time for you to clock out, you simply hit the large “Clock Out” button.
An example time card in TSheets, recording my short, but sweet, clocked time.
More Clocking
Of course, there might be times you can’t actually clock in or out of your work for a one of a variety of reasons. If this happens, you can open a manual time card from the sidebar and input time spent working in there. You can do this for any of your job codes and for any day. You can also still associate notes when submitting in this way.
A manual time card in TSheets shows i'm underestimating my productivity a tad.
If a time comes when you need to log some paid time out, this is only a click away in the sidebar. In a similar interface to the manual time card, the skeuomorphic window for handling paid time off allows you to assign a number of hours of PTO to a specific day. The PTO codes that were setup at the beginning come into use here, allowing you to give reasoning to your time off.
Adding some Paid Time Off in TSheets.
Reports, Invoicing and Add Ons
After you’ve spent time inputting and clocking in your hours of work, you can make use of all your raw data in the form of reports. By heading to the reports link in the sidebar, you can generate things like payroll reports, exportable in a number of file formats.
If you’re using TSheets with others, you can also use this to generate reports of multiple employee’s hours at once.
A published report taken from the data inputted into TSheets.
If you’re using TSheets to do time-based work for a client in a freelance position, the invoice generator will likely be of use to you. Similar to the process of generating a report, you can use your inputted data associated with a specific job, client and/or project from a specific time frame to create an invoice that you can easily send off to your client. This is a really straightforward process that requires little effort yet yields useable results, and doesn’t require the use of yet another service or app.
In fact, invoice generation is just one add-on you can use in conjunction with the core TSheets experience. There’s a ton more you can install onto your dashboard which extend the stock functionality, including adding the ability to call or even tweet to clock in and generate a web-based to-do list.
Final Thoughts
TSheets is a useful app that has some great functionality, and some really helpful ways to use the data you input into it over time. It’s quite unfortunate that this is all wrapped in a less than desirable UI that attempts to resemble a desktop, when it probably look better styled as what it actually is. Nevertheless, you probably won’t be spending your day in it, so the UI shouldn’t be too much of an issue, or an annoyance.
Although it’s not an app I’ll go on to use due to my lack of need for it, it’s an area I’m quite interested in. If you’ve used TSheets or an alternative time sheets app, share your experiences in the comments.