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BonoMan
Feb 20, 2002

Jade Ear Joe
I work at an ad agency and we've tried for years to try to get people to do accurate time tracking and it's never taken. (Not talking about time clock, but hourly time tracking)

Primarily this is because the "barrier to entry" has always been the starting and stopping of any timer. It's just never worked around here. People fall back into their old habits too easily.

Then we stumbled upon ManicTime and it was kind of awesome. Essentially it monitors what you're doing on your computer and creates timelines of your activity that you can either tag/log as you go along or go back through your day and do it at the end. All of a sudden, when a program gets you 90% of the way there, people loved it.

However we've discovered that they don't really have a Mac client (we use about half mac and half pc). They have this sort of Mac lite thing that will report some vague data to your server, but you can't tag it. It's dumb.

So we're looking for a piece of software that works on Mac and PC and offers at least some form of auto tracking with birds eye viewing from managers to pull reports from.

Our goal is not to monitor employees usage and get anal about when they're on facebook or not... just to be able to finally get them to log work time to specific clients and jobs so we can better estimate time in the future (and re-evaluate our hourly costs). The less steps in the way the better. And the less starting and stopping of a timer the better. People never remember and just make poo poo up and that helps nobody.


My drop back and punt option is "Timing" for Mac and "ManicTime" for PC and just aggregate the data at the end of every week somehow.

Also the benefit of those two programs is cheapness. They're $50-$100/license one time fee. Some sites like Timely, for the amount of employees we have, can get up to $7K/year and that's too much for us.

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BonoMan
Feb 20, 2002

Jade Ear Joe

A Real Hologram posted:

Check out “Harvest”

Thanks, we've already looked at it. It basically still relies on manual entry and doesn't auto track anything (and costs $4500/year for us which is too much).

The ManicTime people have gotten back to me and are working to fix my issues so finger crossed!

BonoMan
Feb 20, 2002

Jade Ear Joe

Walked posted:

Toggl is decent; and can do a lot of what youre looking for cross-platform. But not sure how many users you have so the pricing might not line up.

Yeah one of our guys uses Toggl for personal use and it seemed really awesome. Unfortunately the pricing doesn't add up.

So, it turns out ManicTime allows you to tag time via the Web UI when you're a Mac user. Not nearly as full featured as the PC version, but it should be enough for those guys so we're sticking with ManicTime for now.

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