Timestrap currently does fully support time tracking and CSV exports for multiple projects and tasks. It has a full REST API and admin panel. Invoicing will come after I get the dashboard more fleshed out, more export options and better security.
QuickBooks & Xero et al were waaay more than I needed or wanted to pay for.
I ended up using the free tier of Toggl, doing a CSV export and generating a butt-ugly invoice from Excel.
If this tool were available, I'd have used it.
Focus on the time tracking, reporting, etc.
For my own use case I would like to have one location to enter time then select a range, hit "invoice" and be able to send that to a client with a very simple credit card payment system.
I'm a Front End Web Developer at a startup offering a time tracking app with QuickBooks integration. QuickBooks is a premium feature, but we have a 30 day free trial so you can give it a spin.
Our focus is on construction companies, who love our offline support, but it works great for time keeping for anyone and everyone here dogfoods the app every day.
We recently had a big investment come in from CAT: http://www.caterpillar.com/en/company/innovation/caterpillar...
Check us out at https://busybusy.com
Available for Android, iOS and Web
Welcome to the niche, I've only been here for a year and I've been amazed at just how deep and complex a time tracking application really is.
Also, I didn't find where to generate an invoice.
https://github.com/overshard/timestrap/commit/d2217d772bd901...
Friday night start, Monday morning internet fame.
Magic happens, programming skills give superpowers.
Initial thoughts are that it's easy to deploy, but you need to be more explicit in the doc about what people need to do to create the admin account. People who aren't at least passingly familiar with django will get lost at this step.
The minimalism is great, and the UX seems pretty smooth. I intuitively expected a timesheet selection dropdown on the home and entries pages, but once I made a timesheet and added some tasks to it, I could see why those dropdowns weren't actually needed.
It'd be nice to package all the js files and have the option to serve them from my server, rather than hotload them from the internet every time. It's both more private and kinder on the hosters.
I agree with the packaging all JS files comment, for a truly self-hosted solution one should have this option and I plan on doing this for 1.0. Since we use django-compressor it will compress everything down to a single JS file too. Right now for the alpha phase I'm rapidly adding and removing JS libraries so I didn't want to bother with this.
There are a couple items we look for that might be worth including in the CSV exports, depending on what kind of scale you want to plan for. Specifically:
1. Project name,
2. Project ID or number,
3. Employee name,
4. Employee ID or number,
5. Employee email,
6. Supervisor name,
7. Supervisor employee ID or number,
8. Supervisor email,
9. Task or activity code, and
10. Task or activity description.
If I can get that data in a single CSV export for all employees at a company, I'm like 70% done with the calculation.
And while this sounds like an odd use case, pretty much any profitable company doing software development in the US should be claiming the credit (and actually in pretty much any developed country, because most have a credit that was modeled on the US's). Even smaller shops with only a handful of employees usually see substantial benefit. Having the data formatted like this up front reduces the costs of doing an R&D credit study and dramatically reduces the odds of an adverse adjustment in exam or audit. Especially when the employees have been diligent about recording their time and the associated activity/project/task data. It's also worth noting that this is one area of the tax code that does not seem likely to be affected by tax reform as both the Ryan and Trump plans propose to leave the credit as it is.
Edit: oh and I forgot because this doesn't relate to my work, but having an option for charge codes is nice. So something like [client ID].[project ID]. It will improve interoperability with third-party invoicing tools.
EDIT: Added some screenshots to the bottom of the readme
In the long run you can diff the images and assert that they haven't changed more than N% from the reference, but for now, it makes evergreen documentation.
The only changes I'd like to see are: allowing one to log the time work is started (not just the date), a confirmation before deleting data that can't be recovered, and a way to filter the hours charts by day / week / date range.
Confirmation is a must, mistakes happen!
Filters/reporting is coming over the next week, also a must, what's the point of time tracking if you can't compile reports of your time.
Not sure if you intend to turn it into a business but with a little polish and the features you described it's simpler / better than several competing paid products on the market today (as you probably noticed).
But they all need to be part of the same task for one day.
If I've forgotten to start a timer, it's easy for me to look at my browsing history and make a good guess when I started / finished.
Figuring out duration when you stop and start on a task multiple times becomes a pain.
Instead of manually adding things to it, it allows you to mark certain applications and websites as you doing something productive (for example, if you're running Atom and visiting StackOverflow and GitHub, you're probably doing something productive) and then tracks that via its clients and shows you a nice overview of how much of your time is actually spent on doing something productive.
Now, of course, the fact that RescueTime is centralized and hasn't released the source code of its clients makes me instantly dismiss it as a software I would use, but I would love to find a certain self-hosted solution that does pretty much exactly what RescueTime does.
And on Windows, Mac & Linux, it looks like ManicTime will also store data locally if you don't use the Server component:
Seems like the same thing applies for macOS, so I would call it Windows-only solution in the serverless mode. Alternatively, you could run the server[1] on some always-on Windows machine, pay for the license(s) and use the server under your control to store the data.
It automatically tracks productivity for sites, apps, and even Slack teams, showing your productivity score in real time in the menu bar.
We are also working right now on an update that will add automatic project tracking and invoice generation.
How is the reporting in Timestrap? Can a run a query like give me the sum of hours for client Acme Inc from March 23rd to April 23rd?
It is so slow that I first thought the app was broken, but after 8 seconds TimeToFirstByte after clicking "Add" in the "Tasks" window, my entry finally appeared.
I see some great suggestions in the comments, I thought the idea of automating the screenshots that go into the documentation was kind of interesting. The idea that it's cost effective to automate something like that, and further the idea that if the UI changed the documentation would, in a way, automatically update...
I always think when I first see these types of Shows, I'd really live to see an animated gif walkthrough. Ideally, buttons beneath the walkthrough that are labeled '30 seconds', '3 minutes', '15 minutes'. Or some variation on this theme. Does anyone do product demos this way?
I think the quickest, most prominent action should be to start tracking a task - or change which task is currently tracked.
Despite this; great idea and looks beautiful. Seems to fill a bit of a void among task trackers I've used.
I'm fairly OS agnostic and sync all my systems very well and use whatever I'm sitting at.