Time Tracking Software - Seeking recommendations

[Pancho]

We are looking for a way to track engineers' time spent on projects/tasks/components and then use that info for our forecasting, budgeting and project management.

Our engineering group still fills out time sheets "by hand", and then feeds them to payroll for processing. Accounting uses the info to charge to projects. This helps with standard cost tracking, but often our engineers are a critical resource and we do not bill by the hour, so we wish we could manage their time more closely and carefully than with the current setup.

Further, the information in our accounting software is not very user-friendly and does not really allow our PMs or the Engineering Manager to monitor which projects and activities are consuming the engineers' time until it may be too late to do anything about it.

What I think we need is simple time-tracking software that will sit in a server and

* Allow engineers to enter their time in a familiar time sheet format (or, even better, log their time automatically). Each entry should include Project, task and component.
* Remind engineers to fill out their time sheets if they miss doing it.
* Produce reports by projects/tasks/components.
* Compare actual time against forecasts and budget for the different categories.
* Export reports to payroll for their process matching the project/task/component to the proper accounts.

I've eyed a few offerings that may do this trick for us -- Senomix, Replicon and Time-assistant

Have any Covers had experience with these or others? If so can you recommend them?

 

[Jen Kirley]

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[dsheaffe]

Hi, I have used the free trial of Replicon - and while it didn't meet our needs I thought that it was a pretty good product (this was 3 years ago now, but I assume the this remains true).

I might be preaching to the converted, but before you start the selection process, make sure that you have you know exactly what your requirements are - and this includes the users. Get the vendors to reply to each requirement as to how their solution meets it. Get users involved in free trials, demos and the selection itself. Always refer back to your requirements when making your decision - and while there are plenty of other things to consider (support, price, etc), if you select the right product for your needs then that is huge step in the right direction.

Nobody likes doing timesheets so the success of your project will come down to a large extent to how well the users embrace it.

Dave

 

[Cooper41]

We have used Latitude (www [dot] latibiz [dot] com) and it has features that you might be interested to. It's a project management software for surveyors and engineers. It has CRM and billing features. Users can enter their timesheets which includes which task and project for that entry. It can produce various reports of jobs, projects, timesheets, etc. User timesheets can be exported to accounting software for payrolls and it can produce an invoice of job costs.

 

[sagai]

I have seen only custom build software for this purpose in several cases, at the end, that was somehow the solution against packaged software.
br
Sz.

 

[Adrian22]

The problem is that tasks/components are often not comparable. We used ms-project and excel to exercise this several times with the same result. Since you cannot compare task/component content their development time will differ a lot.

Recommendation is to:

1) Define requirements
2) Define sub requirements
3) Ask different developers how much time they need to implement 2.
4) Save nr 3.
5) Compare the total sum/estimate with other projects to get a fair estimate.
6) Record the estimate, sub requirement, and outcome per individual in excel.

If 1-6 is repeated for a few projects estimates can be done more easily by comparing sub requirements. The important thing to record is the variation of the estimate and outcome (often forgotten). Min/Max is often more informative than an estimate itself.

I am not aware of any software that does the above. We have done it in excel for our project leaders using a standard format and introduction to collect statistics for the future.