Project management and time tracking .... What do you use?

Hi,
I’m just wondering what you guys are using to organise your projects and keep track of how much time you spent on a project.

I’ve tried a few but most of them have such a large learning curve I can now understand why Basecamp was so successful. I’m just not sure if I’m willing to invest the $49 a month just so i can get the time tracking functionality.

After some more browsing I just came across FusionDesk Professional (www.fusiondesk.com) which seems to have everything I need and very little else. I particularly like being able to create a task, click on the start timer button and start straight away, so i can see exactly how much time I’m spending on something.

I’ll look forward to hearing from what you are using.

Cheers,
Taff

For multiple parties working from different locations I find Basecamp indeed to be invaluable. Still some things that bug me about it, but it’s making solid headway and works great.

I use activecollab. It is a bit simple but it works out well.

http://www.activecollab.com/

I have used Basecamp for projects with mixed success and for time tracking and billing I use Freshbooks which allows for import and integration with Basecamp for better project billing (but I don’t use this).

My clients love being able to login and see their billing information and they just keep making Freshbooks better. Basecamp is more suited for larger organizations and my segment is purely small, owner managed businesses who just need websites and marketing consulting and not more work.

ATB,

Jay

Thanks for the tip on Freshbooks Jay... you find it speeds up your billing cycle as claimed? Importing time from Basecamp would be awesome.

For US companies needing a payroll solution, I highly suggest having your accountants looking into Paycycle.com ... former Intuit guys with an incredible payroll processing service that’s worth every cent.

Thank you all for your answers. Freshbooks does indeed look very interesting. I’ll give it a try. I wanted to try out activeCollab when I first heard about it. Unfortunately it needed something my webhost didn’t offer (ImmoDb or something like that) so I never got a chance to check it out.

That’s the disadvantage with FusionDesk, it’s not web-based...but saying that, it’s also its strength.

Cheers,
Taff

Yeah I stumbled upon FreshBooks a few months back, it looks really great... too bad, like BaseCamp it’s not localized in french

You should have a look at Joyent’s Connector, not as well know as BaseCamp but seems really amazing.
Currently, it’s a hosted + commercial solution but it would seem they recently chose to make it opensource Can be downloaded here : http://svn.joyent.com/opensource/connector/source/trunk/ (not PHP, but RubyOnRails BTW) and you can get a free 2 User/ 2 GB plan here


As far as I am concerned, I have been using activecollab for over a year, and while it’s limited it’s not that bad to keep track of what has been done. I expect a lot from the 1.0 (commercial) build which seems to step up in all areas which were a bit weak so far... we’ll see !

For time tracking, I use Time Edition (for Mac), simple but pretty useful !

Quote from: rthrash at Aug 26, 2007, 11:25 PM

Thanks for the tip on Freshbooks Jay... you find it speeds up your billing cycle as claimed? Importing time from Basecamp would be awesome.

Yes it speeds up billing as I enter my time into the timesheet and when the project or billing period is done I just generate an invoice and it emails the pdf link. It is also possible to use a payment service (I use paypal) and have clients pay by credit card. In addition if you want to purchase postage you can have FB send out a hard copy invoice for those clients who need them or can’t for some reason click a link.

Recently they have introduced estimates and I think that they are looking at a some type of bookkeeping app for the future but FB style.

The one drawback is all the double work to have my invoices go into Quickbooks but I batch that and usually have an assistant do it once a month.

I’ve never heard of FusionDesk, so can’t say anything about it.
You say, you are not ready to pay for your software, but don’t forget that free doesn’t mean 100% secure.
As to Basecamp, it’s popular, because it’s easy to use. But as to functions it lacks a lot. I recommend Wrike. This article at PCworld.com would be interesting in this connection http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,134816-c,webservices/article.html

Quote from: Straw at Aug 30, 2007, 08:59 AM

I’ve never heard of FusionDesk, so can’t say anything about it.
You say, you are not ready to pay for your software, but don’t forget that free doesn’t mean 100% secure.
As to Basecamp, it’s popular, because it’s easy to use. But as to functions it lacks a lot. I recommend Wrike. This article at PCworld.com would be interesting in this connection http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,134816-c,webservices/article.html

Thanks for the link to Wrike, I’ll check it out, anything that pcworld recommends can’t be all that bad.

I have no objection to paying for software, I would just prefer a one off payment as opposed to a monthly

Cheers,
Taff