Paydirt is among the best time-tracking apps for freelancers who want their tracked hours to be fully integrated with a complete invoicing system. It's easy to use, has plenty of customizations, and is reasonably priced. It doesn't work offline, however, and it offers no mobile apps or desktop apps. Furthermore, it only integrates with a few other apps. Still, it's an excellent service, edged out only slightly by Harvest, our Editors' Choice. For workers looking for a free app and who don't need invoicing, or connect to a different service for it, Toggl's free version is also an Editors' Choice.
Pricing and Plans
Paydirt offers seven tiers of service, starting from $8 per month to $249 per month. While seven options sounds like a lot, the primary difference between most of the plans is how many account members each one supports. There is no free plan, but you can sign up for a 14-day trial. For any plan, if you choose to pay annually rather than monthly, you get a 15 percent discount. None of the plans have limits on projects, tasks, total time tracked, invoices, or quotes.
For solo freelancers, the Starter ($8 per month) and Hustler ($16 per month) plans are the best options. Both only allow for one person to use the account. With Starter, you can manage up to three active clients. Hustler lets you create an unlimited number of clients; it adds an online payment service, too, meaning you can send clients an online invoice and they can pay you via PayPal or Stripe in just a few clicks.
The next tiers of service are called Co-op, Small Team, Large Team, Agency, and Enterprise. They include everything in the Hustler plan, as well as user permission levels, time sheet approval, and task-assignment functionality. What makes each of these plans different is the number of people allowed to use the account. Co-op costs $29 per month for up to three people. Small Team is $49 per month for up to six people. Large Team runs $79 per month for up to 10 people. Agency is $149 for up to 20 people. At the high end, Enterprise is $249 per month for up to 40 people.
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Cost Comparisons
In comparing Paydirt's cost with those of other time-tracking and invoicing apps, it helps to compute a per-person-per-month cost, as that's how most other services charge. Assuming maximum capacity in each of the plans that allows for multiple users, the price ends up between $6.23 and $9.66 per person per month. Those numbers are on the low side among similar services.
Toggl, for instance, charges $10, $20, or $59 per person per month, depending on the plan. But Toggl has a free account option, too, and it's excellent. More importantly, the free version is sufficient for many freelancers' needs, which is what makes it an Editors' Choice. Toggl does not include a full suite of invoicing tools, however.
Harvest costs $12 per person per month, and it also has a free tier of service. Harvest's edge over Paydirt is that it connects to a wide array of other small business apps and services, whereas Paydirt only offers a limited number of integrations.
FreshBooks (Get 60% Off for 4-Months at FreshBooks) , which compares well with PayDirt due to its focus on invoicing, starts at $15 per month and goes up to $50 per month, depending on the plan you choose. It's fair to say FreshBooks is primarily small business accounting software, though it includes time-tracking tools as well.
Another time tracker called Freelancy costs $29.90 per person, but that's a flat one-time fee, not an ongoing rate. TopTracker is another alternative, and one that is totally free alternative—although it's light on features.
All the apps I've mentioned so far are definitely useful for freelancers, even if some of them are appropriate for small and midsize businesses, too. Larger businesses may find that they already have time-tracking tools included in other apps they use. For example, employee monitoring software often includes time tracking, and the same can be said for project management apps. Depending on the needs of the organization, it may be worthwhile to use a time tracker that's built into another tool, especially if it's one that's already implemented.
Getting Started
When you sign up for Paydirt and create an account, you get access to a wealth of orientation content. The site prompts you to complete setup by customizing your account, explaining what each customization means. Suggested video tutorials are easily accessible from the bottom of the page. Everything about the setup process is smooth. Paydirt supports multiple currencies and languages, too.
As with other time-tracking and invoicing apps, you establish your clients, set a default hourly rate to charge them, and then fine-tune the account by adding more detail. Details might include the client's contact information and projects assigned to you, as well as tasks for those projects and the rate of pay for each one, if applicable. Some tasks might not earn you any money, but you might still want to track how much time you spend on them, and Paydirt has an option for non-billable tasks. You can also add a time estimate to tasks to help you better manage your time.
Not all tasks and clients pay by the hour, however. Some projects come net you a flat fee, but you might still want to track your time to be sure you don't work too much on them. Paydirt supports this kind of project billing as well. Harvest (Visit Site at Harvest) supports flat-fee billing as well, and it also provides a helpful setting that alerts you when you hit a specified number of hours working on the project. Since I value my time, I want to know when I'm nearing the point at which the project is taking too long to be profitable. Paydirt doesn't offer this latter ability.
Features
Paydirt doesn't have desktop apps or mobile apps, meaning everything runs in the browser. You can track your time in a module that appears when you log into your Paydirt account, or you can install a browser plugin for quicker access to the timer.
When the browser extension is installed, a tiny clock keeps time down to the second in the browser bar. Clicking it opens a larger view of the timer, in which you can add details about the task you're doing, pause the timer, and stop it when you're finished. From this view, you can also pull up a list of recently timed tasks, which is helpful when picking up work from the day before.
Forgetful workers will like Paydirt's timer because it includes options to start timing in the past, whether 15 minutes ago or at the end of your last timer. It's a signature feature and one of Paydirt's best.
Keywords help forgetful workers, too. As mentioned earlier, you can add details to each of the clients you establish in Paydirt. Among those options are keywords. When you enter keywords related to a particular client, Paydirt's browser extension can be on the lookout for those words and remind you to start a timer if it sees them. Paydirt automatically enters some keywords when they look unique, usually the client's name and email address, but you can fully customize the list.
Paydirt's timer works well, and I like the ability to start timing in the past a lot. But it has one major shortcoming, mentioned earlier: It doesn't work offline. I had a timer running and decided to yank my Ethernet cable out of my computer to see what would happen. Simultaneously, I had a Toggl timer running. The moment the internet connection was gone, Paydirt's Chrome extension changed from a clock to saying, "offline." Toggl's kept recording.
Offline functionality is one reason mobile apps for time tracking are useful. They come in handy when you're in face-to-face meetings, you're driving, and other scenarios. Paydirt doesn't have any mobile apps.
Invoicing
While some time-tracking tools for freelancers let you export the time you've tracked into a form that you can turn into an invoice, Paydirt offers a completely integrated invoicing suite.
The app includes expense-tracking tools, so that if you need to bill a client for purchases, mileage, or any other expenses, you can track them in the app and automatically add them to an invoice alongside your billable hours or project fee.
With Paydirt, you can generate invoices directly in the app and send them electronically to your clients. You can also connect your account to PayPal or Stripe and add an option on the electronic bill for the client to pay you directly using one of those methods. When clients pay you using one of those options, Paydirt tracks that the payment was received. You can also log payments received manually to track your income and money owed to you.
There are tools for recurring invoices as well as partial payments. If you bill a client a portion of the expected total, Paydirt will keep track of the partial payment and the unclaimed amount as well.
Quotes are new to Paydirt as of this writing, but they are a nice addition for those who need them. With the same ease that you can generate a professional invoice, you can also send someone an estimate.
Integrations and Reports
Paydirt is light on integrations. In addition to working with PayPal and Stripe, it can connect to Basecamp, Trello ($0.00 at Trello) , Redbooth, and Zapier, but that's it. On the bright side, Zapier enables many more integrations. It's a third-party online service that lets you create integrations and automations among tools, even if you don't know how to code.
The reports in Paydirt are fine, and they give you another way to bring your data from Paydirt to other apps or services because you can export them as CSV files. While useful in a pinch, it's hardly convenient, and it doesn't give you the benefit of having information automatically updated when it changes in one app or another.
A Very Good Choice
Paydirt is an excellent time tracking app that includes a full suite of invoicing tools. It's among the best, even though it's light on offering integrations and doesn't allow for offline time tracking. If you are considering using Paydirt, I would also recommend looking into Harvest, which is an Editors' Choice and offers many of the same features as Paydirt but also works offline. If you don't need all the invoicing tools and are looking for a simple and free time-tracking app, Toggl's free tier of service is the way to go.
Paydirt is one of the better time-tracking apps available for freelancers, offering a complete invoicing suite. You can't use it offline however, nor does it integrate with many other services.
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