If you have a business or a project – small, large or as an individual freelancer – you probably already use productivity apps like Trello, Zapier, Google Apps, Slack, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Asana or others to improve productivity. However, tracking personal or team time consumed on tasks, customers, projects, and other activities can be elusive. You probably want to track billable time and non-billable time, effect payments from your clients on a per task/month/project basis, track employee productivity per project or per task, track productivity across platforms/apps, and more.
Time-tracking tools help you justify, improve, measure and control your time better, whether as an individual or a team. Let’s examine some time-tracking tools that work well with popular productivity apps.
1. Timely
Timely doesn’t have as many options on display for integration as others. Apart from integrating with Office 365 and Outlook, Google Calendar, Gmail, and Moves, Timely offers users the opportunity to get custom integration for their apps of interest when they contact Timely. Timely generates automatic time-sheets, and they differentiate themselves by allowing customers get custom integration.
Essential, Company and Enterprise are Timely’s three pricing plans, costing $14, $21, and $49 respectively. For their Essential and Company plans, Timely allows users to enjoy a fourteen-day trial period. The app gives managers the opportunity to see their team’s projects and calendars, team members’ workload and project budgets.
2. Tracking Time
Tracking Time integrates with its users’ favorite productivity tools. The add-on works with Any.Do, Asana, Azendoo, Basecamp 2 and 3, Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Google Tasks, Trello, Remember the Milk, TickTick and more.
Tracking Time is unique in offering both integration with third-party productivity tools and functionality. The add-on includes the following options: adding time for other team members, desktop and mobile apps, tracking time in real time, adding time manually, time estimates, importing time entries from CSV, timesheet reports and CSV export, adding notes to time entries, creating multiple tasks at once, running company reports, time audits, duplicating existing projects, exporting timesheets to PDF, and more.
Tracking Time has three price plans. Their basic plan is free, and their Pro plan is $4.99 per user per month. Their highest tier plan is simply their Pro plan but with an unlimited number of users; it goes for $24.99 for 500 hours per month. Their free plan allows up to three users for 30 days.
3. TimeCamp
Time Camp integrates with almost sixty productivity apps, including Basecamp, Trello, Calendar, Podio, Insightly, Asana, Zapier, Xero, and Wunderlist, to mention a few. The tool is feature-rich with over 50 features including time entry notes, graphical timesheet, exporting to Excel, roles and permissions, unlimited hierarchy, online payments, and task synchronization, just to mention a few.
Solo (free), Basic ($7), and Pro ($10) are the pricing options for TimeCamp respectively. This tool is best for teams. It promotes transparency among colleagues, giving visibility into what team members are working on. The tool allows users to track billable and non-billable time.
4. ClickTime
ClickTime integrates with third-party applications and offers accounting and payroll integration solutions. It can be integrated with Google Apps and with Zapier. Through Zapier, ClickTime integrates across hundreds of applications. ClickTime can also be integrated with QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop.
You can track time on a project, client, individual task, or employee bases. ClickTime aims to help users understand their employee utilization, amount of time consumed by tasks, and an account’s profitability. The add-on costs $10 to $12 per user per month, depending on your desired features.
5. Harvest
Harvest integrates with a number of productivity tools and apps cutting across project management, contracts and proposals, accounting, finance, and payments, issue tracking and customer support, Communication and CRM, developer tools, connectivity, analytics and reporting, down to raw productivity itself. They say that integration for your productivity would take less than 30 minutes, and in fact they promise you fifteen minutes.
This add-on may appeal to you if you want to blend productivity time tracking with other aspects of your business. Harvest works across almost all major business software like Salesforce, Google Apps, Lucid, Headshed, Cling, Base, Akita, and more. Consumer Affairs reports that Harvest’s unique selling point is making usability easy, hence influencing adoption rate by customers.
Harvest offers a free 30 day trial, and charges $12 per person per month (or $10.8 per month if you pay for a year).
To wrap up
Time-tracking in itself is almost uniform across platforms. To differentiate themselves, most time-tracking software offers added services. They offer improved ease of integration and a variety of features, allowing you to upload files, download files, handle payments, and more, right from their tool. These time trackers have price differences based mostly on number of users, types of integration desired, and/or length of usage time.
Please leave a comment. What’s your best time tracker for third-party productivity apps and why?
Nicholas Godwin is a technology researcher who helps businesses tell profitable brand stories that their audiences love. He’s worked on projects for Fortune 500 companies, global tech corporations and top consulting firms, from Bloomberg Beta, Accenture, PwC, and Deloitte to HP, Shell, and AT&T. You may follow his work on Twitter or simply say hello. His website is Tech Write Researcher.
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