A few years ago, when I came across OfficeTime, this time-tracking app for workers who bill by the hour impressed me with its simplicity, ease of use, and low cost. OfficeTime is still a wonderful option for solo workers who want a reliable offline time tracker that includes simple expense-tracking and invoicing tools. However, it isn't ideal for collaboration and does not integrate with many other apps and services. For team use and more advanced invoicing options, Harvest is a better app and an Editors' Choice. Another option for solo workers on a budget is Toggl's free version, which is also an Editors' Choice.
Price and Availability
OfficeTime is a downloadable app for Windows and Mac, with mobile apps for iOS and Apple Watch, as well. The desktop apps cost $47 each. Most other time-tracking apps are sold as subscriptions, but with OfficeTime you only pay a one-time purchase fee.
Considering you don't pay an ongoing rate for OfficeTime, the price is low. Other time-tracking apps generally cost somewhere in the range of $8 to $12 per month. Many of those apps, however, support collaboration, meaning you can track and create invoices from not just your time spent on projects but your colleague's time, too. OfficeTime is for solo use only.
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For sole proprietors, OfficeTime offers great value, but there are free versions of other apps that offer similar value. Toggl's free tier of service, for example, is adequate for many freelancers. Toggl doesn't include invoicing, but you can connect it to just about any other invoicing and expensing service you might use.
Harvest (Visit Site at Harvest) , which otherwise costs $12 per person per month, also offers a free version of the app, although it limits you to managing only one project at a time. Another app called TopTracker is totally free, but it's light on features.
Setup and Getting Started
To get OfficeTime, you download the Windows or Mac app, which comes with a free three-week trial period before you have to enter any credit card information. As you set up the account, OfficeTime asks whether you want to start with some dummy data to help you get oriented, or if you want to jump into setting up your own work to track.
To use OfficeTime (and really most time-tracking apps for that matter) effectively, you must spend a few minutes making sure you have a clear understanding of how your business projects are organized. Many professionals have this tacit knowledge at their fingertips, but sometimes it takes a little trial-and-error learning to correctly parse your work. OfficeTime is nimble enough to let you correct your missteps quickly as you go.
OfficeTime saves all your account data locally on your computer, or whatever storage repository you indicate during setup. If you choose to use both the desktop app and iOS app, you can sync your account among these devices, but only when they are connected to the same network (e.g., the same Wi-Fi). There is no option to sync between a Windows desktop app of OfficeTime and a Mac version of the app. The syncing controls only appear in the iOS app, not the desktop apps.
Features
In OfficeTime, you have projects, line items, and categories. Line items are more or less the same thing as tasks, although here they can also be expenses. Each project contains line items, and each line item can be assigned to a category, such as marketing, design, research, or whatever others you create. You can assign projects to categories, too.
When you're ready to get to work, you create a line item and press a play button on the far left side. Your timer will begin tracking time by the minute, which you can see in real time if you leave the window in view. In the Mac version, it also puts a display of the active timer in the status menu, so you can glance up and see how long you've been working on a task. From that same status menu icon, you can also pause and resume time tracking, quickly start tracking time on a new task, and create a reminder.
The reminder feature, which is unique to OfficeTime as far as I know, lets you enter any free-form text you want. OfficeTime will then remind you of it via a pop-up message at a time you set.
Seeing as OfficeTime is a desktop app, everything works offline. Some online time-trackers, such as Toggl, have offline capabilities, though not all do. When testing Toggl, I cut my internet off suddenly to see what would happen to the timer, and it kept ticking away. That wasn't the case with Everhour, which immediately stopped its timer the moment my computer detected it was offline.
If you begin recording a new task in OfficeTime when you already have a timer running, the app automatically pauses the active line item, rendering it impossible for you to accidentally bill two clients or record time for two tasks simultaneously. There is a way to override this setting should you need to.
Line items can be expenses, too, such as stock photography you bought for a client's work or transportation to get to a meeting. You record expenses as if they were any other line item, which means you see them listed right alongside all your tracked time for any given project.
Although OfficeTime includes invoicing and expensing tools, it doesn't cover all situations and conditions that sometimes arise for freelancers. For example, OfficeTime's invoicing and project tools don't handle flat-rate projects. Let's say I charge a flat rate of $200 for a face-to-face consulting session, or $5,000 for a website build, regardless of the amount of time spent on the project. Other apps, such as Harvest and Paydirt, provide ways for appropriately tracking project work and billing for it, whereas OfficeTime only works for billable hours. The reason you might still want to track time on a project with a flat rate is to ensure you're not spending too much time on it and thus rendering it less profitable.
Another missing feature in OfficeTime that shows up in several online time-tracking apps is the ability to estimate how much time a task or project will take. That kind of information helps people improve their time management skills, which can lead to appropriately taking on or rejecting new work.
Reports and Invoices
The reporting and invoicing tools in OfficeTime work well and are clear. I'm always pleased with reporting tools don't require me to have an advanced degree in business jargon to understand what they will show.
As mentioned, OfficeTime isn't ideal for team use, although it is possible to generate multi-person reports by uploading another person's data into your OfficeTime account. That's an unnecessarily clunky process that's prone to errors, especially when compared with services that simply support multiple people in one account. Harvest, Toggl, Paydirt, Everhour, Hours, and other apps all offer true team time-tracking services.
In any event, reports are easy to generate, as are invoices. From the menu, you can select a report, such as Last Month, and see a summary of the work and time tracked appear alongside a pie chart. You can adjust what's shown in the report and, when ready, hit a button at the bottom to create an invoice or export the data.
When generating invoices, OfficeTime can automatically fill in details such as contact information for your company and the client, as well as other standard details. It doesn't have an advanced system for tracking when payments are received, however, which Paydirt offers when you sign up to enable your clients to pay through PayPal or Stripe.
Integrations
OfficeTime does not support many integrations with other apps and services. You can connect the app to iCal, but that's about it. Other time-tracking apps, notably Toggl and Harvest, let you connect them to other commonly used business services, such as QuickBooks, Basecamp, Trello, SmartSheet, and others.
For Tracking Billable Hours Offline
OfficeTime remains a strong time-tracking app if what you need is a reliable tool that works offline to maintain records of billable hours and expenses. It isn't ideal if you are working with a team, or if you sometimes charge clients a project rate rather than an hourly one. If OfficeTime doesn't meet your needs, consider Harvest or Toggl, the Editors' Choices in this category.
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