Re: Lifehack: Tools for Keeping Track of Your Work Hours

[bastard]

Since I went into business for myself its always been about how to minimize time spent doing administrative tasks. To that end i've created a multi user time tracking application that supports the following entry structure:

Clients
    Projects
        Weeks (automatic)
            Task Categories (what the client sees)
                Entries (specific work items and associated hours)

Each of the levels above are collapsible.

Its tooled up via Catalyst and Scriptaculous to support lightweight entry of the above items (very few full screen redraws).

Need to send the timesheet to a client? A single click downloads one! It auto populates an OpenOffice template (with OCR tags at the bottom for the doc management system i'm working on). Eventually it will do PDF as well.

Once the timesheets have been printed, signed and scanned, a script keys off the OCR font tags and files the scanned timesheets under the appropriate client/project folder.

Unfortunately creating the invoice is still manual, but i'm moving towards integrating the time tracking with a client web interface that they use to manage their web services and pay bills (work in progress).

Eventually it will have reports, with charts and graphs to track trends, etc... (Still not sure if i'm going to use JasperReports to generate the reports.)

Actually this time tracking app is on the list of web services to be offered to the public in general (someday). But its lower on the list below a few other projects. (That and it really needs an overhaul of the ajax stuff to work a bit cleaner with the re-draws).