One could try a SaaS (web based) time tracking alternative like HyperOffice.

Qoute (Привет ребята из Белорусии,
Поскольку, с одной стороны, в вашей программе я нашел опцию “Suggest a New Feature”, а, с другой стороны, уже столкнулся с некоторым неудобством при работе с вашей симпатичной программы, мне показалось нужным поделиться с вами моим предложением. Чтобы заработывать на хлеб мне приходится работать и в области рекламы. Наверно вам хорошо известен тот факт, что труд дизайнера зачастую измеряется временем, просидевшем за компьютером, работая над каким либо проектом. Оператору иногда приходится выходить из одного проекта и вскрывать другой проект. Было бы очень неудобно все время входить в вашу программу и нажимать на нужные проекты. Нельзя ли ввести возможность связать проекты, отмеченные в программе, с определенными файлами, над которыми работает дизайнер. Так связать, что нажатием на эти файлы ваша программа сработывала автоматически. Было бы очень удобно. Без затрат лишних психо-физиологических усилий. Последнее не шутка.
Comment by Kiril Kanev, Bulgaria — September 12th, 2007 at 6:08 pm )End of qoute.

Why not write in english, if possible, I dont understand this langues. ?????

Sucesfull download now, the I have to se if this is the rigth one for me. ! !

#64 translated
Hi guys from Belarus,
Because on the one hand, in your program, I found the option "Suggest a New Feature" and, on the other hand, already faced with some inconvenience with your fine program, I thought you want to share with you my proposal. To zarabotyvat bread, I have to work in the field of advertising. Probably you are well aware of the fact that the work is often measured, the designer, prosidevshem the computer, working on how either project. Operator sometimes had to go from one project and open another. It would be very inconvenient for all the time you enter the program and click on the correct projects. Can you introduce the possibility of linking projects highlighted in the program, with certain files, which works designer. So link that clicking on the files your program srabotyvala automatically. It would be very convenient. Without the extra cost psycho-physiological efforts. The latter is not a joke.

thanks gatod! i've downloaded a few useful software from you, though this is my first time commenting. this is an excellent product. i never knew how to keep track on my time when working on a photo project. having this will teach me how to price my artwork based on the time spent on it.

i don't think the majority of the nay sayers cannot find a use for this. if not, your negative comments has no bearing. best comments usually comes from those who've tried a product and relate its pros and cons.

#50 BladedToth - thanks for the additional information on FreshBooks. I will read the help files some time later.

Brilliant! I had been using the web-based clock at slimtimer.com, but was interested in a dependable offline solution. :D

Great software.

I tested the free version from their site and even that is very good.
Our business is sub-contracting and I'm recommending this to the sub-contract programmers now.

NOTE TO ALL - GREAT TRICK - PERSONALIZE REPORT
You can personalize your reports using your Printer Setup ("Print Setup") features... add watermark images... Header... Footers etc...
Print to PDF or Microsoft file formats using virtual printers.

Sincerely, Chris.

Please allow me to direct all the knuckleheads still harping on the "non-commercial usage" issue to comments #40 and #59 and to respectfully ask them to wake up or shut up.
Thank you.

#58:

Of course I know that many couples have very tough discussions about who's working more and harder. Often enough they will have to find a solution and often enough they are not even considering to do so and many times this means that they finally will be divorced.
I only think that this program is not the solution to this special kind of problem. If it would be that easy ...

#13: I have Vista on my laptop, and one desktop. Sortof wish all my computers had Vista on them. Vista is far superior to XP! Just that alot of software is not being written for Vista. If you used Vista, you would learn to love its capabilities. Microsoft has taken a huge step forward when they came out with Vista!!

As for this softwware, I dont need it because I work for another large company. Though I do landscaping on the side, just for fun and profit. I am personally glad to see GAOTD catering more to the busness sector.

Привет ребята из Белорусии,
Поскольку, с одной стороны, в вашей программе я нашел опцию "Suggest a New Feature", а, с другой стороны, уже столкнулся с некоторым неудобством при работе с вашей симпатичной программы, мне показалось нужным поделиться с вами моим предложением. Чтобы заработывать на хлеб мне приходится работать и в области рекламы. Наверно вам хорошо известен тот факт, что труд дизайнера зачастую измеряется временем, просидевшем за компьютером, работая над каким либо проектом. Оператору иногда приходится выходить из одного проекта и вскрывать другой проект. Было бы очень неудобно все время входить в вашу программу и нажимать на нужные проекты. Нельзя ли ввести возможность связать проекты, отмеченные в программе, с определенными файлами, над которыми работает дизайнер. Так связать, что нажатием на эти файлы ваша программа сработывала автоматически. Было бы очень удобно. Без затрат лишних психо-физиологических усилий. Последнее не шутка.

Thanks, this is easy and simple for daily use.

#57 - Default message or not, telling users they can not use the software here for commercial purposes then offering software that can only be used for commercial purposes is silly.

If they are going to tell people "non commercial use only" then QUIT OFFERING COMMERCIAL ONLY SOFTWARE. Duh...

#31, can you elaborate a bit on your comment: "Those with any version of MS Office already have more capabilities than ETT. MS Office has built in client and time tracking capabilities, and there are free templates (and they are simple enough to create) that will start tracking as soon as any document associated with a client is open (including but not limited to the contacts)."

I'd especially like to know about the auto-start time tracking when a document / file is opened.

Mike,

GOATD has its default policy, however ultimately it's the vendor who decides what's possible and what not. In this case we allow the commercial use. It overrides any other restrictions.

Regards,
ETT Pro Team.

I read "master yoda"'s comment and i am amazed... EVERYONE knows about the ongoing dispute between mother and father. Whether one or the other works harder or longer...

Also, i think you were talking to me when you said "why not just do your homework"... And i do my homework most of the time, i messed up once or twice in the past year, and it was because she gave me just too much to do. So, now i can say that it was indeed too much time i had to spend on homework compared to other times....

To comment #26:

I don't know HOW well that will be, But i hope it helps ^_^.

-- I agree with your ideas on homeschooling, but only so much. I can only hope that you are trying to get them to socialize as much as they can. But ya, homeschooling rocks other then the few people who grow up not knowing how to talk in society.

EVERYONE needs to quit with this non-commercial usage nonsense. It is GOATD's default message and they won't change it any time soon.

A business software intended for non-commercial purposes would be like serving dinner but telling people in the table not to eat it. So use your own logic please.

For those who are having problems, the first time I loaded up the program, it did NOT have the icons in the left green bar. Without these icons, the program had zero functionality.

I exited out of the program, and restarted it, and only then did the icons appear. Also, there is an online tutorial found when you click "help" at the top of the program.

What about the formulation "comercial usage of the program on home conditions on a PC of a NGO". Is it legal? That's my case. Attorney Federal?

#47 Thanks!

And thanks to GOTD.

Easy Time Tracking Team

Nice that you are OK with this being downloaded for commercial purposes however, GAOTD strictly prohibits the use of the free software for commercial usage.

With so much commercial software being given out lately, maybe it is time for GAOTD to update the terms for downloading software and remove the "non commercial use" restriction as it is causing much confusion here. (Uh oh, I expressed my opinion. I have a feeling this post will now go "Poof").

I was going to DL it but decided not to due to the non commercial usage policy on this site. I would have no use for this program other than in a commercial setting.

I have been trying out today and so far I like what I see.

Thanks for the givaway.

Hello GerGn!

I don't think I am clear on what you're saying. You can assign a different rate to each task, and you can also change the rate. You can also denote each task as billable or unbillable, allowing you to track all your hours (As I do so I can accurately denote how much of my home can be written off as tax write-offs as well.) The 'tariff' as you state is just a default dollar amount that will auto-attach to each new task, but can be adjusted in the tasks or on a client-by-client basis. You don't need to create a new staff member for each 'rate', just adjust at the client or employee level. I run a few different services, each of which garner a different rate and I have no issues at all with handling this through FreshBooks; I recommend taking a little more look around and read the helpfiles. There is a LOT of features to FreshBooks that makes it very lucerative! :)

Oops - the free version of FreshBooks only allows one staff member. What shall I do - open a new FreshBooks account for each rate???

BladedThoth, thanks for your tip to use FreshBooks. I just made an account, but when I defined my first project, I already saw a huge restriction of FreshBooks over Easy Time Tracking. The former seems to allow only one tariff per staff member. With Easy Time Tracking I can define many tasks and subtasks with each its own tariff. So I can register unbillable things like writing proposals and travelling for each project. For Dutch tax reasons, I will have to spend about 1,225 hours per year on my one man's firm. That includes unbillable time. So, even if I was personally not interested in knowing how many of my working hours are unbillable, I still need to register them. And my rate can be different in each assigment. So, with FreshBooks it seems I have to define a dummy staff memeber for each rate. GerGn Unbillable will have a rate of € 0 per hour. And GerGn xxx will have a rate of € xxx per hour.

I appreciate the offer of this product. I DO track time for clients and would appreciate a very simple, easy-to-use utility for that. The "not for commercial use" doesn't bother me one bit, because I wouldn't use the software commercially...just the information it provides. Duh!

However, I think I would be distracted by customization and tinkering, as BladedThoth revealed the possibility. I like my docs to look good.

However, if all I need is the total hours by which to multiply a rate and bill in QuickBooks (or over the phone), I think I'll stick with F5.

Here's how F5 works:
1) Open Notepad.
2) Press F5 to enter the current date and time. Each time stamp goes on its own line. When you start or stop--even to take a phone call--it's simple enough to hit F5. If you forget, you can hit it when you think of it and edit the time. I usually add 2-3 words at the end of the entry to remind myself what part of the project I was working on: research, design, etc.
3) Save the file in the Client's folder. I always call them "time.txt."
4) Copy and paste the whole record into http://monsterguitars.com/hours/.
5) Hit "Get Hours" and you'll be delivered a popup total in a box.

After I've billed a client for a record, I start a new one with the next number, such as "time2.txt."

I hope this helps. It's a very easy solution. Not to say the Giveaway isn't cool. I like the idea. But my client-billed projects don't warrant my spending an hour keeping time. Maybe if I were an attorney...

good. I am glad that someone has clarified this now. Apparently, this program can be used for commercial purposes, so that is great for all those that wanted to use this for commercial purposes. My apologies to those that I just mentioned in my earlier posting, but I was just going strictly by the terms and conditions given earlier to make the conclusions I made about their usage.

#34: How is this useful for your contracting work that you do from home? Contracting work that you do from home is a home business. That would make it commercial usage.

#14: As stated in the terms of using this software, this is for STRICTLY non-commercial usage. Is billing your customers for time spent on repairing their computers and networking systems. Is this non-commercial usage? I don't think so.

Please note that the software you download and install during the Giveaway period comes with the following important limitations:

No free technical support
No free upgrades to future versions
Strictly non-commercial usage

That which is measured tends to improve.

That is reason enough to try it, assuming you don't already have a am industry-specific time-billing system.

Adam Okhai

Not for me!! Still waiting for a nice simple diary program. what I did , what Ive done and where I should be going ETC............

As mentioned by others above, there is a totally-free version available for those of you who may like this title but are concerned about the non-commercial clause here at GaotD.

http://www.easytimetracking.net/downloads/

Essentially it's like pro, minus the following: multi-user, export to csv, customizable report header/footer, time reminders, support for easy projects .net and usb support.

Another commercial program. With the restrction "non-commercial use" this is almost useless.
Didn't download any software from this site for almost an entire week (I visit the site every day) because I was unable to find any software I can make use of.

Just to make it clear - we DO ALLOW to use this special copy for the commercial purposes.

If you have any questions - please contact us via the support form on the web-site.

Regards,
Easy Time Tracking Team.

#27

My impression is, that it is #4's husbands' household activities that is being tracked :)

Remind me never to show this program to my wife :D

Interesting program. It's feast or famine with me. I downloaded about 20 programs in the last month...and in the last week only one. The mail newsletter thing came in handy when my website crashed due to a hardware failure. I was able to send a quick email to my entire member list which my email would have had a hard time doing. The bounce replies came back to my normal email. So, sometimes these programs we download to try for fun, wind up being VERY useful. I was VERY happy I had it.

I don't plan on downloading this because I have two programs on my Palm TX that work great for what I need to have done. This is overkill for me in my situation.

But if you THINK you might use it, you should try it. You can always uninstall it or go back to your restore point (if active) if you discover that it won't work for you.

Hello all! Today's 15-Minute Review is up! Check it out!

http://www.bladedthoth.com/reviews/15mrs/easy-time-tracking-pro-v3-0-7/

Thanks! I just got the free version last weekend to handle my work on a variety of projects. I tried a number of options and had ended up liking this one best. I was wondering if I should upgrade to the Pro version - thanks to GAOTD I can try it out first and see if I need the additional features.

It took me a bit longer than average to figure out how to change things around to work for me - and I actually had to check with Help to figure one or two things out...I'm not overly big on "RFM" in general.

#8 - Installing was easy - on Vista.

#20 - I had no problems AFTER I read the readme.txt file. Amazing what tidbits of information they put in there.

#2 - I played with the settings - was able to change it so I could enter the amount of time spent on a task rather than the default start/end times.

I am sure there are other options - MS Office, web based, etc - but this meets my needs, was fairly easy to figure out how to use, and looks better than the spreadsheet it replaced.

Open Source/freeware: Time Stamp

I think some of you should demand your money back ;) Some of you don't appreciate a whole lot. I'm glad you are not PAYING customers. I think this program is useful. I haven't found some of the software previously offered useful, but you don't hear me whining about it. Grow up!
I do a lot of contracting work from my home and it is nice to track time spent on each project. Thank you GAOTD!

With so many web-based options, why would you want a time & billing package that is not web-based? What are you going to do have your employees RDP into one computer?

Still need a nice screensaver for my new pc, months ago they were on all the time now have not seen one for over a month.

After a little finagalling, I got the program to accept the license.

What I had to do was download the 30 day trial from the website and install that. Then I used the freely provided license key (ETT.CNFG), which successfully unlocked the program. This is also good news for those who actually want this waste of bits; you can use this technique to back up the program in case your computer crashes.

Too bad the program is hardly worth anything. Those with any version of MS Office already have more capabilities than ETT. MS Office has built in client and time tracking capabilities, and there are free templates (and they are simple enough to create) that will start tracking as soon as any document associated with a client is open (including but not limited to the contacts).

The passwords are only for program access. The database does NOT get encrypted in ANY way. In fact, I was able to open the created database and edit it using ACCESS and Excel.

Also, despite being presented as a FULL WORKING VERSION of the ETT PRO software, that is FALSE ADVERTISING as the license is restricted to a single user, and ETT Pro is clearly advertised as providing multi-user support.

For those businesspersons without MS Office or Lotus, if you want to use this for your business the restriction on "no commercial use" is NOT A CONTRACT and simply can not be enforced.

I suggest that if you want your employees to use this, install a copy on each computer that each employee can then personalize. Instead of having them create the reports, have them send you the database file, which you can then compile in Access or Excel.

I had great success creating four seperate accounts with seperate customer/task lists. I then imported and compiled them in Access, then replaced them in the ETT database folder. I could then generate any report available.

OR - you could just use MS office for the whole process, which is way more powerful. If you've already paid for MS Office, why not use what you paid big bucks for instead of hackware like ETT?

Imagine the GAOTD site without this comment's page:
we check the new giveaway and in few minutes we download it or not = a short contact...

As the numbers are important also for GAOTD:
- No download = 1 point negative
- Long time side's contact (the time spent checking for the new product and reading the comments) = 1 point positive
- One more comment (altougth arguing about the “stricly non commercial usage” rule = 1 point positive
Final score: 1 point positive.

Indeed most of us are not the target of this giveaway (it's not the first time)and if GAOTD will take care of the comments on the next days the score could be: 3 points positive!
This is my way to say "thanks anyway" to GAOTD, Frankel


-

I have no trouble using this with Vista. Before I ran the setup file, I clicked "Properties" first, clicked on "Compatibility", and then clicked the option to have it run in XP mode. It's very simple to register this program, too. After you unpack the zip file, just move the ETT file to your desktop or other place that's easy to find on your computer. When you bring up the program for the first time, there is an option to add the ETT file, so just click and drag it where it needs to go. Also, the first time I ran the program, I couldn't add customers or do much of anything, actually, so I closed it, brought it back up, and then it worked just fine.

Hope this might help someone.

Cindy

This just might be a good tool for an individual to use, or at least keep on-hand, because one never knows if or when they might do some freelance work, or barter work, or even if they want to know how much time they're spending on "business" things such as auction sites. How many folks out there use eBay, but don't really know how much time you're spending at selling, packaging, communicating, etc, by comparison to how much money you're taking in as a seller?
I'm going to try this out, give it an honest shot at being useful. Try it, review it, and give it honest reviews/feedback, folks, rather than criticizing something because it doesn't fit your immediate wants.
You do know that GOTD doesn't have to keep this service going, so please knock off judging something until you at least try it.
Thanks for reading this, and have a great day!

#4:

Why this? Will you be fired by your husband unless you do enough housework or doesn't he trust you? Why not just doing the housework? Does it at least help you doing the housework better or faster? What is the benefit? I'm rather curious about that. And if there is no benefit then why use it?

(Another Usage for SUCH a Program) Actually this type of program could be useful for they that homeschool their teenagers. For example, my daughter works quite independently, needling little help. Thus, she is on her computer much of the day but also goes online for intermittent breaks. Rather than using a deceptive technique to watch what the kid is doing at the computer using spyware, (which can destroy a relationship for life so I refuse to ever do it) such a program can report openly what is being done via applications. With that being known to the teen then they will be more keen to be more particular in how they use their time, if it has thus far been an issue. (For those against homeschooling, how they make use of their time is no different than public school teens unwisely using their homework time at home.) ;o)
I will give this a try for that purpose, but also because I have my own company at home. With that said, I have not yet downloaded it but wanted to share my reason in trying it since it was not listed and may even give a fellow homeschool parent the idea, encouragement, or consideration for such a program since I have not yet seem such in the community online. I personally feel it could edify the student in time management as well. That, to me, is something no teen should have to graduate without: time management skills (vs procrastination).
If anyone knows of another program akin to this one for such a purpose please share. I do not know how this one would actually pan out.
As to GOTD, the work is appreciated. I suppose we all grow spoiled and selfish as time goes on and we take things for granted. We know you are not here for us personally (to cater individually) but it can feel that way, lol. Seriously, its never wise to bite the hand that feeds. Let's just be grateful for when there is a program tailored to our needs/wants. If its one a year, then it has succeeded for all three parties. Hence, the point to it all, yeah? ;o) Otherwise, the programmers/companies may not be intrigued to make their offer due to all the insufficient negativity. Just a thought. I get all sides though.

I tested the freeware version some time ago and decided I liked it soo much I ordered the shareware version the next day. I use it to track my hours spend as an associate and generate surveys of my hours per project, and bills. I can recommend it very much. The only problem is the licence. The program is of some use for non-professional work, but not very much so. If I had to track time for my social activities, I would certainly not need the paid version.

The only thing that annoys me is that I still not have the Dutch version I was promised within a few days two months ago.

Description states:

"Easy Time Tracking is an ideal solution for the individual contractors who need to know how much time they spent on certain tasks and how many hours they need to bill their clients for."

Terms for downloading state:

"Strictly non-commercial usage"

I run a business so I am going to download this and use it. I hope the netcops dont show up and bust me.