Time Tracking And Invoicing Apps To Boost Your Productivity
As a web designer, you should also devote yourself to managing the accounting affairs of your business. You may feel that you’re in a strange territory.
You may or may not be a “numbers personâ€. But, there are various tasks that you need to do. For example, submitting quotations and invoices. You might also have to provide information on discounts, and even track the time spent on various tasks. This seems far from what you do best – design.
Time tracking and invoicing go hand in hand; and having a good method for tracking your time, will save you time. By investing in a high-quality, easy to work with time tracking app, you find you have more time to do what you do best. You will also have more leisure time as well.
There’s plenty of time tracking, invoicing, and other project and business management software products on the market. Here are 10 of the best; guaranteed to give your productivity a definite boost.
FreshBooks is a cloud-based, intuitive invoicing app designed for use by small business owners. It is an effective tool for freelancers as well. FreshBooks does more than collect the details you need to include in your invoices. You can add your brand’s color scheme and logo; thereby giving each invoice a unique, professional look. When you submit an invoice (via email), this app informs you whether your client has seen it; obviating the need for a follow-up query.
FreshBooks even goes a few steps further. In fact, it has numerous features that will help you streamline the business side of your work. You can set it up to receive online payments, you can check the dashboard for an overview on how your business is doing, and late payment notifications can be automatically sent out. You can even use the FreshBooks mobile app to take pictures of receipts on your phone to better keep track of your expenses.
One more thing; FreshBooks also manages your invoice time tracking needs.
It’s human nature to forget when you did some of your past activities. This is especially bothersome when trying to track time. In such cases, no wonder why Timely has become one of the best-loved time tracking apps on the market. Its new feature, Memory, automatically tracks every file you work on, the start and end times of your tasks, the websites you visit or apps you use. All this information is organized and presented in an intelligent timeline.
Memory by Timely can tell you what you work on and for exactly how long. It also captures all you do in Trello, Gmail, Office365/Outlook Calendar, Github, etc. Best of all, no one, including your boss, a colleague, or anyone else but you can see your timeline.
Clients love what Memory by Timely does, because the information you do choose to share shows them exactly what they’ve paid for.
Futuramo Time Tracker is a cloud-based app designed to help individuals and teams alike better manage their time and work. Its powerful advanced statistics give project managers and other users’ valuable insight into particular work habits that need to be modified to improve future time and cost estimates, as well as team performance.
Powerful filtering, searching and sorting features allow you to find information by date range, client, assignee, and project or project status to help you keep in touch with your team’s activities on one or multiple projects. You can also use these filters to view past projects to help you plan your next ones; something that is generally time-consuming and difficult to do. Futuramo Time Tracker changes all that.
There’s nothing to install, so you can get up and running in a matter of seconds. Futuramo Time Tracker is free for up to 3 users.
Elorus is a new online invoicing and billing app. It is especially useful for freelancers and smaller businesses to manage their sales and expenses; but with a twist that will definitely mark you, the user, as a professional. It has a dedicated client area that features a private portal where business owners can invite their clients to download invoices and pay them online, and review past transactions.
This is an especially nice touch when dealing with recurring customers. As the app owner, you have complete control over who will be invited to log into the portal.
Online time tracking, timesheet generation, invoicing, and project budgeting and management are all made easier with Avaza. This multipurpose app is an ideal choice for creative agencies and small businesses. Avaza is currently in use by more than 15,000 businesses throughout the world.
Avaza Timesheets is a particularly useful feature for online time tracking, while Avaza Expenses helps you to effectively staff expenses by allowing your team to snap images of receipts from their mobile devices and enter them via email or apps. It costs you nothing to sign up for Avaza.
What makes Timing unique? A number of things, actually. For starters, automatic time tracking, so you don’t have to manually start and stop the tracking feature. Also, an interactive timeline that shows you exactly what you’ve been up to. Besides these two, the option to create your own rules to further automate your categorization of tracked activities. Something really important these days is your privacy. Your data is not uploaded to the cloud.
Perhaps it’s time to switch from manual to automatic time tracking. You’ll find it’s not only more convenient; but much more fun! Download and start a free 14-day trial from the website.
As its name implies, Free Invoice Generator is a free service that enables you to rapidly create an invoice and have it delivered to your email address in PDF format. You can include important information such as links, notes, and other details to your invoice. Hiveage, Free Invoice Generator’s creator, also has a tool for you with added, more powerful features; if you sign up for an account.
Trigger is a great option if you’re looking for a time tracking solution that keeps everyone accountable. Trigger makes team members log time against actual tasks (either in real time or after the event), so there’s no more dummy time recorded and no more excuses for not logging all time spent.
Trigger also offers project management, team collaboration, invoicing (direct to Xero), task lists, Kanban options, milestones, project templates and more.
ClickTime – Easy Online TimesheetsÂ
ClickTime has the tools you need to help you manage project costs and stay on budget. These include the Easy Online Timesheets feature, a selection of pre-built reports that will help you to surface performance issues and metrics, time tracking, expense tracking, and a resource planning dashboard.
You’ll have no problem customizing Clicktime to fit your business needs. Free companion mobile apps are available.
Paymo will be a rewarding choice if you’re on the lookout for a project management app that will help you manage your projects from planning to delivery. Paymo’s many features address planning, scheduling, task assignment, time tracking, and performance reports generation.
It also makes it easier to stay in sync with your team and, once your projects are complete, you can use Paymo to issue invoices to your clients.
Adding It All Up
There’s something here for about every freelancer, web designer, or business owner. This list of top time tracking and invoicing apps includes several examples of each type or tool and several products that do both.
Several of the products listed here cover a range of project management needs. This is true especially in the accounting area where some users have limited experience.
