How we track our time at Springtimesoft

Time tracking. The old behemoth. The bane of service providers everywhere. Whether you bill for time or not, as a service provider it is essential that you can effectively and efficiently track how you spend your time and how long activities take you and your team.

At Springtimesoft we have always used MinuteDock - an Aotearoa based, online time tracking software. We’ve been using it since it’s first year in 2010 and it forms the backbone of our internal and external time reporting.

Here’s a few of the reasons we use MinuteDock:

Time tracking dock

The thing that makes MinuteDock unique is its ease of tracking and increased productivity through smart shortcuts to make it really fast to enter your time.

• The quick lookups of projects and tags and making the choice with enter
• The ability to backdate your entries by just typing (yesterday) and hitting tab (crucial if you forgot to track the meeting you went to yesterday, or [last friday]
• You can type the duration of your entry and hitting tab to automatically update the time counter, or double click it to add manually
• Rather than adding multiple of the same entries, you can redock any time entry to resume tracking it

Reports

MinuteDock has strong in-built reporting functionality for pulling breakdowns of time spent by person, project, contacts and more, across any given time period. Filtering this is straightforward once you’re used to where everything goes. From a report you can pin and save it for next time, export the entries to CSV, view visual graphs of the breakdowns and more. This gives us a great amount of flexibility in the ways we view our time.

Goals

MinuteDock’s Goals are a useful feature that we use often. If we’re working within a particular limit of time I’ll set a budget to keep an eye on how we’re tracking. We also have goals for the amount of time our team tracks, and these give us a great way to visually sense check this without going into the nitty gritty of the time entries.

Integrates with Xero

It’s a no-brainer that our time tracking should integrate directly with our invoicing. When we’re doing time and materials type work, we use Minutedock to generate invoices based on our time tracked. With the push of a button this is then sent through to Xero for review and sending.

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To get the best out of Minutedock it’s important to set it up right. The reports and goals are only as good as the information you provide, so clear Project tags, work classifications and time tracking policies make a big difference.

The key to finding a time tracking tool is, like with any software, understanding what you’re using it for. For us, MinuteDock is an excellent balance between our organisation’s requirements for time tracking, and our user experience of making it as painless and efficient as possible.