Freelance Time Tracking
I love doing freelance web development; however, as with any business, I have to do quite a bit of administration that is significantly less fun, and provides substantial overhead. My philosophy is to only bill the client for the work that directly benefits them, so my personal policy is to not bill the client for a single minute of this administrative overhead–I simply absorb it into my cost of doing business.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize it’s in my best interest to develop a process (or a program) to minimize this overhead.
For starters, I use Basecamp to manage my tasks and milestones, but for a moonlighter like myself to upgrade to the $50/month plan to get time tracking as a feature is absurd, and would by no means make a positive influence to my bottom line.
Stand-alone time tracking solutions exist, and some of them are even free (for a single project), such as Tick. For $9/month you can even integrate your Tick account with Basecamp, though I have no idea if a prerequisite for the integration is the $49/month Basecamp account and I don’t plan on forking over money to find out.
To be honest, I don’t really trust my data on other companies servers. I have no control over downtime, and I can’t customize the application to fit my needs–so I’m rolling my own. This weekend I spent a few hours playing with the CodeIgniter PHP framework and I have a working time tracking application that sits on my servers, is extendable (I do have the source code, after all), and is free (as in beer that I had to make myself.)
Before I release the source to the world as an open source project I want to cinch up a few of the last loose ends, and maybe make it a little more feature rich; so I ask you: what do you want in your time tracking program?
Good suggestions will probably get incorporated into this application.
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January 14th, 2008 at 12:16 pm §
Time tracking? Hmm, that is probably something I should be doing, huh?
You might be interested in this nifty timer: http://theinsomniacsociety.com/timer.html
January 14th, 2008 at 6:40 pm §
Yeah, time tracking is pretty important if you charge by the hour. I’d say it is still important even if you don’t though, as it allows you to better manage future estimates and quotes.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:50 am §
I’m in just about the same position, only I haven’t started writing anything yet.
Is your solution sharable? I’d love to get on it and start playing.
Some features I’d like:
* Run on a LAMP stack
* Easy time tracking with notes, of course.
* Log-ins for multiple people (There are 2 of us right now).
* reports that subtotal by week, so I can easily invoice. Bonus for generating an invoice I can just sent off (PDF or HTML)
* Track what has been invoiced and what hasn’t. I don’t want to remember dates, I just want to “print next invoice”
* Track billable and non-billable time.
* Be able to track a per-project time budget (i.e. I have a client who wants 24 hrs/week — I want to see how I’m doing with that overall).
Ideally — well structured code I can hack some of these features into ;)