Invoicing is a fact of any freelancer’s life. With all of the “glamour” that comes from being self-employed and working with companies on a freelance basis comes the joy that is invoicing, often involving tracking time and logging it carefully.
T:metrack (which, for the sake of my fingers, is going to become Timetrack for this review) is an invoicing solution designed to help you focus less on your invoicing and more on creating excellent stuff.
Pricing
Timetrack offers plenty of tiers to its customers, from the Free plan that limits you to three customers and three invoices per month all the way up to the “Multi-Users 11–50” plan that gives you unlimited invoicing and customers and a bunch of other nifty things that you can control when you’re logging your time.
Timetrack offers a variety of options for all types of customers.
Each plan is fairly affordable; the plan that will likely appeal to most people is the Freelance plan, which costs just $16/month. This review is based on the Free plan, but will likely be applicable to the other plans as well.
Sign Up and First Launch
I enjoyed Timetrack right from the sign up page. Instead of forcing you to go through items one by one or making you submit your information before the system yells at you, Timetrack uses some simple, attractive notifiers next to the field you’re currently working in. This seems like a small thing but it just goes to illustrate the attention to detail that the team behind Timetrack has put into its software.
Timetrack allows you to input important information right at the first launch.
When you launch the application for the first time you’re greeted with a form to help you configure your settings. I enjoyed that the software put this right at the first launch instead of forcing me to dig through the interface (as pretty as it is) and find out where this information should be entered.
Interacting with Customers
Adding customers (clients) into Timetrack is as easy as pushing a few buttons. The customers pop-up that appears allows you to define the customer thoroughly, offering fields for Address, City, Website, etc. You can even assign each customer a color of your choice, allowing you to differentiate between customers at a glance.
Defining customer information.
After you log your time in the app (which will be discussed later) you can create an invoice that will be sent to your customer automatically. Timetrack will then generate a wonderful report for you, showing the amount of money that you thought you would make for a period, the amount that you invoiced for, and how much money you’ve actually been paid.
Reports page.
Being able to store the customer’s information directly within the app and being able to hit a single button to send the invoice is beyond convenient. Instead of entering or confirming the information over and over again, Timetrack keeps the stored data ready for use.
Adding your company's information.
Entering your own company’s information is just as easy; you can add any of your information to a form and have it taken care of the same way that your customer’s data is. If you want to include a company logo on your invoices to customers that’s possible as well, all from the same interface.
Logging Your Time
Using Timetrack, as I’ve done my best to illustrate above, is easy. Instead of manually entering a bunch of data to log your time Timetrack features a drag-and-drop interface where you can drag ‘trackers’ from the left side of the screen over to an hourly calendar view on the right.
Each item will have a default time associated with it that can be changed by simply grabbing the corner of the box and dragging it up or down. This way, instead of having to manually enter “Thursday, Start: 3:00 PM End: 8:00 PM Type: Development” over and over again you can simply drag a block, resize, and be done with it.
Blocks on the left, time on the right; doesn't get much easier than that.
The Free plan allows you to set a price for your time that doesn’t differentiate between the different actions that you may have been taking; ‘Meetings’ and ‘Development’ will be compensated for with the same amount. Other plans allow you to add specific values to different types of activities, charging more for Development than for Meetings, for example.
Conclusion
Using Timetrack was enjoyable and simple, something that I never thought I would write about invoicing software. Timetrack takes a lot of the headache out of dealing with your customers when it comes to pay day, which is always welcome with any freelancer.
Through a combination of low prices, inviting interface, functionality, and ease-of-use, I would say that Timetrack is an excellent application if you charge your customers by the hour. Unfortunately plenty of jobs (including my own) are invoiced based on the actual amount of work produced, not how long it took to produce it.
Because time doesn’t matter for my invoices, I can’t use Timetrack to get paid. This genuinely upsets me, as I would prefer the ease-of-use offered by Timetrack to manually creating an invoice any day.