Toggl: Time Tracking You’ll Actually Use

Whether you’re a freelancer, billing your clients by the hour, or are working with your team on an awesome idea, It’s always a good idea to track your time. Tracking time lets you plan your tasks better, period. But most of the apps available are riddled with bugs or confusing UIs. Some are over dependant on one platform (desktop or web), limiting their scope.

Today we’re going to take a look at the new generation web app, Toggl. It looks so promising and comes up with a cheesy tagline “Time tracking that actually works”. Does it live up to its promise? That’s exactly what we’re going to find out.

Toggl

Toggl is a web based tool that helps you track all your tasks. The best part about it is that it also has native apps that work everywhere- on a PC, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android and web. Then, on the web, you can integrate it with your Google account or embed the code in your website. This way, you can use it anywhere you work, and always keep up with your time tracking.

The Interface a.k.a Usability

Toggl wears a familiar look that of twitter. You’re welcomed with a huge timer where you can enter the task for which you need to track and click Start. Once you’re done just click Stop. That’s it, it’ll calculate the time you’ve been working and save it. You can then select a project for this task and even enter custom tags for easy filtering. You can also stop working on a task and resume it later.

The home page keeps track of all the tasks you’ve completed so far. You can see a split up of your time across various projects at the right side. The reporting menu has a tabbed interface and allows you to run the reports in various formats.

The system allows you to organise your work better with various workspaces. Let’s say if I’m working on some freelancing work and a personal project. Instead of creating a different project for both, you can creare a separate workspace to reduce clutter. This is one of the many ways it works better for people that are keeping up with multiple projects at the same time.

Features

Toggl hides a multitude of features under it’s hood. Since time tracking for billable projects is better coupled with a billing machine, Toggl lets you can track your time complete with your custom rates, so you’ll see how much you should charge for each thing you’ve done. You can then share the time tracking info with your clients, which adds credibility to your business as your client gets to see the actual effort you’ve put in.

Many of us have accounts with multiple apps like Basecamp, FreshBook, QuickBooks, and more for our freelancing needs. Toggl does a great job with integrating seamlessly with all these tools.Also, if you have your existing time records in CSV format you can simply import using their importer and have all your records at one place.

Working with a team? User management is really easy with Toggl. Just enter your team members email address you’re done. The app will automatically send an email notification, inviting them to the project. Once they join you can monitor their progress and estimate the amount of work.

Reporting is the most important asset for any Project Manager and Toggl does a wonderful job at that. You can view detailed reports, weekly reports and even book mark a specific report with your team mates. You can also download your reports as PDF and CSV for easy sharing.

Since most of us will end up using their desktop version most of the time it’s worth covering it here. The desktop apps sits pretty in your system and comes with more powerful features like idle detector and autopilot. Personally, I love the autopilot mode as my work is fragmented across multiple activities. Basically it analyses your work pattern and suggests which project to charge based on the open applications. It’s really efficient and works right most of the times. It also detects the idle time (you can specify the limit) and you can add or ignore them.

Pricing and Support

I really love the cost model at Toggl. You get a free plan for one workspace up to 5 users. Their paid plans are really flexible and lets you pay only for what you use. You pay $5/mo per user, so your price simply goes up per user as your team grows, which is good for smaller teams. At any time you can combine their free and paid plans, for instance one free workspace with 5 or less users and another pro with more users. It’s works great if you’re working in multiple projects with different teams.

Their support team is quite effective. I contacted them a couple of times and they were really courteous and prompt. They were able to resolve my queries quickly.

Wrapping up

I’ve tried many time management apps over the last few months. Nothing else was compelling and lacked several features. When I started with Toggl, I was really apprehensive but after spending some time with it I must admit, I’m impressed. A job well done.

Toggl simple to use and anyone can start using it without much training. It’s clean and robust, not something that pairs up more often. Their desktop version, in a way is more powerful for tracking and just gets better with Autopilot mode. With Basecamp and FreshBooks integration, it has become an indispensable tool in my workspace.

I’d strongly recommend you this tool if you’re a freelancer or running a small business. And to answer your question, Yes: it’s a time tracking tool that indeed works.

Best of all, if you’d like to try it out, we’ve got 5 free 3-month pro accounts to give away to our readers. Simply click the link below and send out the resulting tweet (or just copy and paste), then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet and a brief reason you’d love to use Toggl in your business. We’ll close the contest on Midnight CST April 15, so be sure to get your tweet in by then!