Where can I find simple Windows freeware to track costs for projects?

July 18, 2005 12:25 AM

I'm looking for some very simple Windows freeware that will let the 20-odd people in my office assign hours to projects and then add up the costs.

We're currently using a poorly-designed prehistoric Access database that's updated by rekeying info from printed Excel-based timesheets (seriously). The replacement doesn't need a lot of bells and whistles - we just need to be able to:

- add people (name, team, position and salary);
- add projects (name, and to assign it to one of maybe five categories of project);
- let each person say "well, I think I spent x hours on Project Y today'; and
- have it work out how the office spent its time (and money) by project, team, project type etc.

We don't have products or customers or different rates for different kinds of project - it just needs to track how much time people spent on each project and work out the total costs based on our respective annual salaries. Bonus points if you can enter total time worked for a day (or a week, or whatever), then assign percentage guesstimates to a number of tasks (for example, "I worked 37.5 hours this week, and I think I spent 15% of my time on Project A, 25% on Project B and 60% on Project C). Freeware a must, standalone / no installation required is way up there on the "nice to have" list - some kind of clever self-contained webby thing like the very cool NextAction would be great, but I've no idea how these kinds of things stand up to multiple simultaneous users. Thanks!

posted by obiwanwasabi to work & money (4 comments total)

Crud. I've used something like this before that was java-based and could even update a MySQL database with time records, but I can't remember the name. It's on my computer at work, I'll post it tomorrow AM...
posted by SpecialK at 1:41 AM on July 18, 2005

ACE Project is a free online tool for project management.
posted by Rothko at 1:57 AM on July 18, 2005

Startwright maintains a list of project management tools and templates here.

There *used* to be a great list of Open-Source project management tools here, but the site seems to be down.

DotProject has a good reputation as a powerful tool.
posted by enrevanche at 3:04 AM on July 18, 2005

Obiwan, I hope you're still checking this. IF YOU HAD AN EMAIL IN YOUR PROFILE I could contact you, but since you don't...

The app we use for this is ConsultComm.

http://consultcomm.sourceforge.net/about.php
posted by SpecialK at 2:55 PM on July 20, 2005