Dear all,
Long time reader - first time poster.
I've had many tips from other peoples topics on this forum so am hoping that someone out there can help me find an appropriate and elegant method of tracking time for the design studio I manage. I thought it would be easy to find as so many design studios run macs, but no luck so far.
I need to record time that different designers spend on specific projects. Currently we do this by filling out paper sheets retrospectively, which are then typed into an excel spreadsheet. I am sure I don't need to point out the many drawbacks of this system.
I have looked high and low for an appropriate and, just as importantly, elegant mac based solution. There are many products out there but I haven't found a single solution I like. Some of the problems being:
Some solutions require opening up an online account and paying a monthly subscription fee. I don't want to pay every month and I don't want a third party holding my data.
Many solutions require timers to be stopped and started as you work. My team will never remember to do this and I don't see why they should have to. Something like Slife would be good, but it's not quite there yet for a few reasons. So better to fill in the whole week, or every day, at it's end.
Time can not be added to a centralized list, I'm not a single freelancer, I need to compile a total number of hours for the whole team.
I don't want anyone but me to be able to setup a new job to record time against. I want to be able to do this from my computer or the server and for it to feed through to all of the terminals we have.
Filling out a time sheet for a block of hours should be at least as easy as making a new ical event and preferably be done in a week to view type calendar.
I need to be able to either throughly analyze the figures in the application itself or preferably export them to excel for analysis there.
In short, I want a super-simple to use Mac style team time-tracker. Is it too much to ask? It seems to be, but hopefully you know something I don't.
Thanks in advance!
Long time reader - first time poster.
I've had many tips from other peoples topics on this forum so am hoping that someone out there can help me find an appropriate and elegant method of tracking time for the design studio I manage. I thought it would be easy to find as so many design studios run macs, but no luck so far.
I need to record time that different designers spend on specific projects. Currently we do this by filling out paper sheets retrospectively, which are then typed into an excel spreadsheet. I am sure I don't need to point out the many drawbacks of this system.
I have looked high and low for an appropriate and, just as importantly, elegant mac based solution. There are many products out there but I haven't found a single solution I like. Some of the problems being:
Some solutions require opening up an online account and paying a monthly subscription fee. I don't want to pay every month and I don't want a third party holding my data.
Many solutions require timers to be stopped and started as you work. My team will never remember to do this and I don't see why they should have to. Something like Slife would be good, but it's not quite there yet for a few reasons. So better to fill in the whole week, or every day, at it's end.
Time can not be added to a centralized list, I'm not a single freelancer, I need to compile a total number of hours for the whole team.
I don't want anyone but me to be able to setup a new job to record time against. I want to be able to do this from my computer or the server and for it to feed through to all of the terminals we have.
Filling out a time sheet for a block of hours should be at least as easy as making a new ical event and preferably be done in a week to view type calendar.
I need to be able to either throughly analyze the figures in the application itself or preferably export them to excel for analysis there.
In short, I want a super-simple to use Mac style team time-tracker. Is it too much to ask? It seems to be, but hopefully you know something I don't.
Thanks in advance!