Do you have any recommendations for timesheet software?

March 16, 2004 9:42 PM

I run a small (~15 person) software development company that is reliant on tracking timesheets for invoicing and payroll purposes. We built our own internal application for doing this a few years back, but it could be working better and rather than rebuilding it ourselves I'm thinking the easiest thing would be to just license something.

Any recommendations? Timesheets suck, so ideally it should be relatively painless to use, accurate, and produce useful reports.
posted by kaefer to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Nothing specific but I do see free versions of this on Freshmeat/SourceForge, you should probably do a search there.
posted by billsaysthis at 9:49 PM on March 16, 2004

<mode=obvious>
I take it you've done a price and feature comparison with TimeSlips? It's practically the Quicken of this niche, and I've worked with more than a few shops who depend on it, without finding one who identified specific shortcomings.
Which isn't to say you won't.
</mode>
posted by dhartung at 10:37 PM on March 16, 2004

If you guys are mac based, I've used and can recommend iwork.
posted by jazzkat11 at 5:45 AM on March 17, 2004

do you do your own pay checks, or do you oursource to ADP or somebody?

they might have some software, free for you, to help collect your data and export it to their system. i remember ADP had something that i worked with about 6 years ago.
posted by taumeson at 7:07 AM on March 17, 2004

At our shop we all log into accounting.quickbooks.com to enter client time. It's pretty simple & friendly. I presume the boss has a desktop Quickbooks client running the show. I don't know how he feels about it, but from the staff's standpoint it couldn't be much easier.
posted by Tubes at 8:53 AM on March 17, 2004

Where I work, we have to start up Virtual PC on our Macs, then give our passwords to get into the timesheet program, then click on TIMEUSER and give the password for that, which is TIMEUSER. For everybody. I've asked several help-desk guys what the point is of making us type in a ten-stroke "password" which is the same for everybody, and they all just shrug and say something like "That's the way it was set up." So... my recommendation?

Don't do it that way.
posted by languagehat at 10:20 AM on March 17, 2004

My office uses Advantage by Deltek for timesheets, which seems to work pretty well from my vantage point (I just type my time in and don't deal with any of the back-end stuff). I work for a firm that deals with billable hours, so differentiating between projects is important for us. I think the program may be much more complex and offer a lot more as far as billing and accounting than what I normally have to deal with, so it may be too much for what you need.
posted by LionIndex at 5:38 PM on March 17, 2004

Konae is an open-source Linux-based solution for timesheeting.

"The system is designed to be filled in everyday by staff, and that information is then used in two ways - to work out pay, and to build invoices.

The system is built in Perl, backed by a MySQL database running on a Linux box, and served by Apache. The source is open - so if you have the skills you can make your own modifications. If you develop a whole new module we expect you to share that with the rest of us as well. "

The developers have good track record.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:06 PM on March 17, 2004