Our new app: Project Time Tracker for Android. Yet another time tracking app, you might ask? Read on what makes Project Time Tracker’s approach different.

There are loads of different time tracking apps available on Google Play, but, from our point of view, they share some problems.

Post-enter data

Most of these are designed to be used after you did some work, e.g. at the end of a day or week, or maybe even at the end of a month. Honestly, we don’t believe there is anybody out there who wants to sit down at the end of a hard working day and note down what he did. We believe, most people will do this for a few days, then they will start to skip tracking for a day or two (“I’ll do that tomorrow, I promise!“) – and finally data in the app is not worth anything anymore. It will have missing days, will be missing a few hours, but who knows what is in and what not? In addition, the longer you wait to enter your data / working times, there more it will become unprecise (best scenario) or even simply wrong, what could get you into trouble, if your billing or loan is based on your time tracking. What a mess!

Pre-enter data

There are other apps, that are designed the opposite way: enter data first, make adjustments later – but this approach also has its flaws. It takes quite some time to enter all times, and doesn’t make it any better if you have to do that before you get your real jobs done. In addition, what happens when your schedule changes? Right, all work done for nothing, you have to change all plans you did in the apps, without any profit.
To ship around the a.m. problem, some apps even go one stop further: they want you to replace your calendar app. We believe in a “best-of-breed” approach, so everybody should take the solution, the app, the whatever what suits best to solve problems. Sticking to one solution to get everything done will most likely result in a solution, that is somehow kind-of-capable in all areas, but not very good in anything.

Live tracking!

With all the a.m. in mind, we decided to throw-in our own solution: Project Time Tracker. While it is capable of doing both a.m. approaches (pre-enter data, post-enter data), it was designed around an approach right in the middle: live tracking.

We focused on quick usage when you start to do something. You have a separate launcher icon to start tracking, so it is possible to have the begin of your working time saved with two touches.
You don’t have to know how long you might work and you don’t have to type in end-times. Focus on what makes money: do your job and and don’t think about tracking. When your job is done, you tap the same direct launcher icon again, type in a title, select a project and hit the save button. That’s it!

But what happens at the end of the month? Billing time. We don’t think your employer will care about what app (or whatever solution) you use for time tracking, so we believe the time tracking app has to be able to make your data available to other solutions. Project Time Tracker has integrated data export capabilities, so your data is not locked-in. You can export your (filtered) data and later on e.g. make this data available to billing systems. PTT’s data export capabilities are not limited by design – if you need a special format or special fields please let us know, so we can talk about integrating your needs.

Before you export data, you can check all tasks for errors, as you prefer in a list of tasks or in a chart – you will immediately see if there are jobs missing.

That was a long text – we would suggest you give Project Time Tracker a try: It is available on Google Play as of now. PTT is free, so nothing is lost if you don’t like it.

Just a few final words: Project Time Tracker is under active development and we would appreciate if you let us know your thoughts, as well as if you might need some adjustments – get in contact with us, so we can see if we can integrate these needs into the app.