Keeping track of your billable time, working time and other time keeping like project time keeping is very important to independent entrepreneurs and people who bill people by the hour. OfficeTime provide you with easy Time Keeping and Tracking. In this review we will take a closer look to OfficeTime from Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings.
Features
Luck had it that I had to track time for a project I work on for a company which hired my services, so I was able to really use the software on a daily scale. The first thing you notice is that you can set up your first Project once you start the program so I did.
Projects
OfficeTime splits all your time entries and billable time in their own projects so you don’t see one huge list but rather only see entries for the selected project. Which makes it easier to see what you already did, how much you did and how much you made so far if your tracking billable time as well. You can also export reports of each project which you could for example hand over to your customer or project leader.
Reports
Like I said above the application allows you to track projects and their entries separately and allows you to make reports about them. You can make an easy report by just clicking on Quick Report and the report it creates includes all that you really need. It includes for example the subtotal of all the earnings, time spent and so on.
Next to that you get a graph showing you how much time you spent on each sort of activity or category that you’ve set up. Making it easy for you, your customer or project leader to see how much time you spent on each little thing.
Invoicing
Tracking your time is great, having nice reports is good as well. But for you it all comes down to being paid. Luckily once you create a report like you see above you can also just with one click create an invoice to send to the customer. Once you click the invoice button the program will ask you for a couple of things such as the contact information of your customer, the tax rate, which invoice number you want it to have and so much more as you can see below.
Once your all done setting the administrative settings of your invoice and choosing a pre-made design you can make the invoice by simply clicking on the make invoice button. It will be saved as a RTF document which can be opened with Microsoft Word for example and can easily be adjusted. It has some basic styling but I would recommend that you do make your own design, it’s a bit outdated.
Something that should absolutely be mentioned is that OfficeTime also has Android and Iphone apps which make it very easy for you to track your time on the road, check-in when you’re at your customer and check-out when you leave his front door. An absolutely great addition to the program!
OfficeTime has so much to offer and we cannot go into every single detail. You can for example split projects to different employees which you can set in the program, and for each employee you can run its own report and invoice. You can add next to time entries also expenses and so much more. OfficeTime scores a 9.5 out of 10 on its features it has everything you need (that I can imagine) to keep track of your time and all its features are very complete.
Ease of Use
Due to the huge amount of features that OfficeTime offers customers it’s a bit hard to get at first, features are a bit hidden and the user interface itself could be easier to use. However, once you start to really use the program it becomes more and more familiar to use (as it should) and you will find out that it is actually pretty easy to use. We however do believe that it could be just a little bit better.
The good thing of OfficeTime is that once you first start the application you immediately receive a very welcoming guide through the program in the form of help tips which is a great addition and something I miss quite a lot in other programs. On ease of use I would score OfficeTime a 7.5 out 10. This score is due to the interface just being too hard in the begin which scares customers away.
Design
One of the reasons I had some comments on the ease of use was because of the design of the application. OfficeTime is designed a bit old fashioned and feels old. This however does not impact the usability of the program which is actually quite good. The design is very clear and things are placed quite handy. The design is user friendly as in that you can instantly see what the button does.
As you can see in the image above it’s a clear user interface but like I said a bit an old design it does not really match the Windows 8 or Windows 10 design style which is something they should consider updating. As you can see the design however is very clear you see a clock with an add button to start a new session and so on. The design itself scores an 8.5 out of 10. If they would just make it a bit more modern, it would score a 9.5 or even higher.
Verdict
OfficeTime does what it’s intended for, it tracks your office time and it does a good job at it. You can add notes, add time, set billable time and export reports about the time you spent on a particular project. It’s full of features and they synchronization between Android and OfficeTime and / or IPhone and OfficeTime is a very good addition to a product of this age. We at WindowsInstructed believe if you are looking for a good application to track your time that you should seriously consider OfficeTime and we are not saying that because they paid us we really mean it. OfficeTime scores a 8.5 out of 10 overall.
Disclaimer: WindowsInstructed received payment for this review. However the opinions and the score in this review are those set by the authors. OfficeTime had no influence in this review
