10 Tools to Help Entrepreneurs Track Billable Hours
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
Members took the time to share with us their answer to the question:
What’s your current favorite technology to track billable hours? Why?
1. Project Bubble
We use Project Bubble to track all billable hours for certain projects. It allows all team members to add to the project and keeps everything organized. Everyone is always on the same page — then we simply export the billable hours for each project into our invoicing software. It couldn’t be any easier.
– Jonathan Long, Market Domination Media
2. TSheets
TSheets is easy to set up, can handle complicated time tracking options and has mobile options. Process and single point of entry are the most important to a growing client; TSheets has allowed our customers to save hours with the direct integration to QuickBooks.
3. Paymo
It’s simple, it’s flexible and it’s great for tracking employee hours without burdening the managers or others on the team. I highly recommend it. We’ve had many of our part time staff and consultants use Paymo in the past and it’s always worked very well.
4. Mavenlink
Mavenlink is the most user-friendly and efficient time tracking software that we have come across thus far. It provides instant reports and the ability to plan future projects based on information from past ones. Its mobile website is available through all devices, and most importantly, it is easily navigated by our entire team — which leaves out any confusion or frustration.
– Miles Jennings, Recruiter.com
5. Desktime
We use DeskTime. In addition to tracking billable hours, it also records time as productive/neutral or unproductive based on the users’ active applications or websites visited. Over time, it learns what’s productive and what’s not. It also generates comprehensive reports showing productive time and efficiency KPI for every team member.
– Andrew Kucheriavy, Intechnic
6. Time Doctor
There are many solutions for this, but right now I really like Time Doctor. This is a web-based platform that does everything I need, such as monitoring hours worked, recording screenshots, creating invoices and a lot more. This is very useful, whether people are working in one place or remotely. It definitely encourages productivity when everything is so easy to track.
– Shawn Porat, Fortune Cookie Advertising
7. Harvest + Asana
We integrate Harvest (which has great time tracking and reporting) with Asana, where our team’s tasks are stored. We can then log time directly from within Asana against a particular task (for instance, a software feature within a larger project). This provides transparency to our clients as to where our time is going at the feature level, and they can compare them against our original estimates.
– Inderpal Singh, Northshore Partners
8. HoursTracker Pro
We use HoursTracker Pro to track hours worked, expenses, etc. We love the GPS integration features, and the ability to group entries by different views. The pay periods are automatically set, and additionally have different types of export. All in all, it’s super useful and user friendly.
– Marcela DeVivo, National Debt Relief
9. Tenrox Timesheet
This cloud-based time management tool tracks everything from employee hours, expense, project budgeting and other trackable billings. It’s provides us with a real-time graphical workflow engine, which is a major contributor to the time and productivity factor that keeps my company’s momentum going. Tenrox Timesheets gives me a reason to look forward to the end of the month.
10. Screenshot Monitor
Our company works with a lot of freelancers and we use Screenshot Monitor every day to track their hours. It’s similar to other popular time tracking software out there, but differs in one important way — it periodically takes screenshots. Since this software will randomly take a screenshot of a person’s screen, we don’t have to worry about them charging us for time and not doing work.