Hi – another question for the STW Hive Mind

At work we are looking to track how much time we spend working for our external clients. As such we are looking for a system where we can set up clients, their projects and activities and allow users to be able to book against those activities. Ideally a user must be assigned to an activity to be able to book some time.

The system must be cloud hosted, ideally with Apps for both Android and iPhones. We don’t need stopwatch time functionality to record the exact time, we are more than happy with individuals entering their best estimates. Not all time will be booked this way, just the ones which relate to external clients.

Some simple back end software to let us do reports would be good, but an export to a CSV file is fine.

We expect to pay for this service and ideally it should be hosted in the UK or EU. Looking for about 40 people at max

I’ve done plenty of searching on the web and are starting to get overload. if anyone has used a system and has had a good experience then could you let me know the name of it. Likewise bad experiences are useful as well.

We don’t need a full project management system

Thanks in advance – Alan

I can tell you what to avoid: SAP.

It’s very clunky and, although it interfaces well with corporate finance processes, your users will hate you for it.

Harvest is good – we use it as there’s an iPhone app and our engineers can update it offline and it syncs next time they connect. Exports to Excel if needed but has some pretty good built in reporting. Does everything on your wish list.

We moved away from it a year ago to a proper project management tool and are now moving back!

For simple project time/allocation we used klok. Was simple to set up and very very cheap.

I’ve also endured the following:
Oracle
SFDC
SAP
Jira (the client didn’t have a clue and thought it could do this)
Excel
a worserer version of Oracle, with a great front end app written in the NDL-MX platform (so platform agnostic, allegedly). It should be able to talk to anything as a backend. Get yer SQL skills honed!

We use Tempo for Jira.

It’s pretty horrible, but generates detailed reports on the other end if you’re into that thing.

For simple project time/allocation we used klok. Was simple to set up and very very cheap.

Me too, its pretty good actually.
Can’t comment on the admin side of it though as i’m just a dumb ‘user’

Another shout for Harvest here, although I think they are US based.

They had it setup at my last job. Slick UI, and reliable. They have a nice API also, so can integrate with other existing systems if you wanted.

Have a look at Hours, and see if it will scale up for you.
It works for me, but I’m not a multi-user..

I used Teamwork I was WFH and freelancing. It’ll do what you need and more. Setup and run by some dudes in Ireland that know their stuff. Very personable too.

Toggl

I think we tried Toggl before Harvest but ditched it for some reason – not very helpful I know but it wasn’t me investigating it or using it much I’m afraid!