According to Nasdaq, as much as 43% of Americans are expected to switch to freelancing jobs by 2020. Freelancing offers numerous benefits and an opportunity to maintain a healthy work-life balance but is also associated with certain challenges. These challenges have increased the need for good freelance time tracking apps.
Freelancing requires self-discipline
“Freelancing requires self-discipline. When you work from home, it gets harder to stay productive and focused. Proper time management is crucial for any freelancer,” explains Kate O’Donovan, freelancer at College-Writers. Fortunately, there are many effective freelance time tracking apps that can help freelancers manage their time.
Freelance time tracking apps can work as personal assistants
There are various programs that work as personal assistants, not only tracking time but also helping with organizing data, accounting, and project management. Such tools will also be appreciated by managers who work with remote teams of any kind.
5 Great Freelance Time Tracking Apps for Freelancers and Teams:
Timely
This is a great tool for both mobile teams and individual freelancers, as it offers many useful functions. There are Apple Watch and iPhone apps that allow Timely to work across multiple devices, tracking productivity. The program also integrates with a calendar and enables you to set the billing cost for multiple projects, depending on the chosen unit of time. The price starts at $7/month.
Hubstaff
This time tracking program was created specifically for freelancers and teams. It includes a convenient dashboard where you can monitor your activity for various periods of time, along with calendar time sheets. It also enables you to schedule tasks and to adjust settings as you like. However, not all settings are available in a free version, and the prices start at $5/month.
Harvest
This is a very popular solution that has various powerful tools for team time management and built-in expense tracking. It allows you to manage resources and provides visual reports so that you can check time entries for any discrepancies. This is also a great solution for invoicing: it allows project managers to submit and approve invoices while checking all the details in a timeline format. Harvest is absolutely free for individual freelancers with up to 2 projects. Other pricing plans start at $12/month.
Toggl
This app has more than 1.5 million users around the world. It is a great solution for remote teams, as it includes both time tracking and billing tools. It has a very simple interface and provides informative reports so that you can see how your teams spend their time when working. The app also integrates with Chrome and includes offline tracking, which makes this solution flexible, fast, and mobile. The prices start at $9/month.
Toptracker
This application was created for both freelancers and their clients. TopTracker offers many useful features for free. You can use this program anywhere, quickly starting and pausing time tracking by using hotkeys. Simple user-friendly interface allows you to manage multiple projects, checking statistics and planning necessary activities. Another advantage of TopTracker is that it doesn’t have limits regarding the number of projects or users.
Conclusion
There are many applications that can help with time tracking and team management. There are solutions for a budget of any size. All you have to do is just choose a freelance time tracking app that fits the specifics of your business.
About the Author
Ester Brierley is a QA Engineer in a software outsourcing company, content creator and virtual assistant for College-Writers, and she knows the secret for balancing freelancing and her full-time job. Enjoys creative writing and blogging about cutting-edge digital trends. Follow her on Twitter.
