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Activities & Expenses Tracker
for Workgroups For those of us whose livelihood depends on maintaining accurate and detailed records of billable time, the need for good quality time tracking software is obvious. In these economic times even small in-house workgroups in corporate settings are being compelled to generate detailed reports of their activities by the hour. There are some 60-odd time tracking products available for the Macintosh, a handful of which are also compatible with Windows, and nearly all of which are in the form of shareware. They vary in quality and capability, but a good middle-of-the road example of these cross-platform time tracking products is the shareware application, Activities & Expenses Tracker for Workgroups by SpiritWorks. Features and Interface A & E Tracker enables the user to create timers for multiple projects, assign multiple billing rates according to activity, track recurring and itemized expenses, and follow the activities of multiple employees. You can also run multiple timers simultaneously for such things as billing for printing time while working on other projects. Also, you can pause a timer — or leave it running for that matter — and shut down your machine, then resume exactly where you left off after restarting. The interface is quite good, providing customizable popup fields for specifying employees, projects, activities and clients as well as fields for entering expense information and project notes. Once created, these lists can be exported for use by other members of the workgroup. Additional fields are provided for tracking the time estimate and the variance, for mileage costs, invoice numbers, and for manually entering timer data, to name a few. The main project tracking window also includes buttons for sorting navigation, exporting, importing, deleting records, identifying job status and a button for condensing the window. Buttons are also provided for entering list content, times, and dates, manually, and for entering or searching dates by calendar or other methods. Other buttons are provided for editing various fields, for calling up records by activity, client, and project, and for accessing a manually created list of recurring jobs. Some of the fields can be toggled for multiple functions. For example, the activity notes field can change to a timer log with dedicated editing buttons. The user field, which is located just under the start date field, can toggle to an ending date field, also with dedicated edit buttons. In addition to the standard view, the user can also view projects on an easy-to-sort grid or summarized via a quick check interface. There is a separate invoices and reports panel that includes sorting fields and a range of buttons for determining the data to be included in the report or invoice. Expense reports can be incorporated into the time tracking report or generated on their own via a dedicated tabbed panel. These reports can then be printed for output as tab delimited text for importation into a spreadsheet or database, like a QuickBooks file, or in a proprietary format for backups. |
In addition to its other features, A & E Tracker has an excellent help interface with a tutorial and detailed information on dozens of topics. Observations This application shines best in a single user situation and is aimed at creating daily records as opposed to tracking long-haul projects. This makes it a good choice for freelancers or for small agencies. On the down side, records can track only one activity at a time and you can only restart a stopped timer on the same day that it was created. Although you can pause a timer and resume it on subsequent days, you can not edit a time unless the timer is stopped, which makes it difficult to maintain a record that spans more than a single day. Even so, there is a limitation of 100 hours per record. If you are tracking an activity that spans weeks or months you can end up with dozens of records for that single activity. There is no dedicated server version, so shared data, exported content, list data, and the like must be imported and exported manually. A & E Tracker has no problem generating a combined report of all records for a specific project, client, or activity but if you want to combine all records for a single project or activity into a single record, this must be done manually. The difference between the user and administrator versions of this application is in password protection of popup lists for clients, projects and the like. Thanks to the multiple warning screens, such data can not be accidentally deleted, making password protection optional. While A & E Tracker has many strengths, there is still room for improvement. For example, the main window includes a button for opening the table view but this is not reciprocal, which makes it possible for a user to close the main window and not be able to reopen it without relaunching the application. The addition of a button to the table view window would be a simple fix. Two other suggestions are the addition of editable field names and a field for project or case numbers – features that would come in handy for in-house legal departments or for design projects involving sub-brands associated with a major client. Conclusions There are more elaborate and powerful time and expense trackers available, but when it comes to the detailed tracking of small- to medium-sized projects, A & E Tracker does a great job and offers a nice balance between ease of use and power. If you routinely handle lengthy projects, however, you might want to spend some time with the downloadable 30 day demo before buying. Activities
& Expense Tracker for Workgroups
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