Small businesses are everywhere. They keep a community vibrant, relevant and stable while providing services and products that consumers enjoy. Sometimes it’s easy to spot a small business by its quaint storefront or relatively convenient downtown location. However, not all small businesses are so easily recognizable.
Mobile small businesses are equally as important to a community, but lack the visual notice that storefronts offer. Mobile businesses rely many times on by-the-hour compensation with clients who appreciate exacting records of labor costs. Unfortunately, not everything runs by-the-hour and so time can be relative or spread out across periods of time during the completion of projects.
So how can small businesses, self-employed and entrepreneurs track their billable time easily? Well, they could carry around a stopwatch or guesstimate the time based on their arrival and completion. We’ve found a better way in the form of a mobile app – Timesheet.
Timesheet – Time Tracker
Timesheet – Time Tracker is a free time tracking mobile app that records time spent on Projects and Tasks while neatly organizing them into timeframes with automatically calculated billable totals and workflow statistics.
Skip to the end for an image slideshow of Timesheet screen captures.
Projects
Projects are the top level way of labeling the service performed. They can be named anything you like and are sorted to display open Projects first while maintaining an archive of closed Projects.
Each Project includes a description, hourly rate, location, employer/client and automatic tracking label. None of which are mandatory which makes the Project creation process extremely flexible. Location can be determined by a device’s built-in GPS or entered in by hand.
Tasks
Each Task is part of a Project. Users start a task with a simple touch of the screen and Timesheet begins tracking the time until stopped. Tasks can be interrupted for both a break and completion, giving users with longer projects time to grab lunch or a quick snack.
Every completed task requests information on the work performed during that task in the form of description, tags, hourly rate, location and mood. Mood is a way to describe your feeling post-task. Mood may seem like an unnecessary label at first, but I’ve often found it to be a way of illustrating how the task went, regardless of success rate. There is also a field to mark the task Paid.
Along with the basics are Expenses and Notes. Each can be added to Tasks for further completeness. For fast access to projects and tasks, Timesheet also includes a simple widget.
Tracking
Even after just a week of steady client interaction, Timesheet can begin to rack up the statistical data. The Statistics area of Timesheet displays graphs and charts to illustrate how much work has been performed, break usage, frequency etc. All the data is derived from Projects and Tasks to really give insight into one’s workflow.