Tracking time and expenses

In my previous job, I simply had to keep track of time spent on some project. I used SDS Time for years: simple, straightforward, and with the data in CSV format on my desktop, quite easy to fill out the company time sheets. We didn’t monitor anything beyond “hours on a project”, and with categories and so, I could also keep track of time spent on certain private projects and boards and so.

When I started working as freelance consultant, I wanted to track time, and expenses as well, in more detail: what kind of activities do I spent my time and money on? SDS Time no longer fitted my needs, so I started to look around. Surfing around, it’s obvious we’re moving into a category where there’s money attached 🙂

• Standard Time offers a lot, including project management, integration with M$ Project, and so on. But it seemed a bit too much focused on pre-determined plans, and have an overlap with my more general notes and task tracking habits. Also, during my trials, it seemed to eat up a lot of processor time when it started up, making other work almost impossible.
• Project Companion also is quite a beast. It even needs Internet Information Server on my desktop to be useful at all… And then it just didn’t really feel as if it would help: not too responsive in behaviour, and not fully supporting my idea about linking projects, tasks, and activities.
• The best match so far is iambic’s Time Reporter, the most expensive solution, but with some nice features: importing from my calendar, and the ability to change the data model a bit (switch off milage tracking as I’m not racing around in a car, link projects to clients, and some tasks to specific projects, and the best interface to add new items to lists while I found out what I really want to track).