Freckle is a time tracking application that will help you track all of the time you’re spending on projects. It also allows you to track the time you spend on unbillable aspects of a project, like research or phone calls. With freckle, you’ll see how much time you’re spending on a project, how much time you have left to finish, and how many hours to bill your client for.
When you sign up for freckle (there is a free 30-day trial) you’ll choose a username which will also be part of your unique URL. So my URL is demogirl.letsfreckle.com. Whenever I need to sign into my freckle account, I’ll need to go to that URL, not the freckle homepage.
Logging time is pretty simple – enter in a number for hours or minutes (freckle will know what you mean) and then create a project name or type in the name of an existing project. It doesn’t even really have to be a project. You could track the amount of time you just spent answering email. Then add tags or notes for your project. These will help you see what you’re spending the most time on during the day as well has help you when trying to figure out how many hours to bill a client. If you don’t want the time you just entered to be tracked as billable hours, then just place an * at the end of the tag.
You can also collaborate with co-workers in freckle. As the owner of my freckle account, I can simply choose a username and password for someone I work with and they’ll receive an email with login information. Now you’ll see who is working on what and how much time they have left to finish a project. If two people are working on the same project, you’ll see what each person has been working on and how much time they’ve been spending on any given task.
Each project has it’s own summary page where you’ll see all of the activity of the people working on it. You can easily archive projects and reactivate them and download the entries as a CSV file.
Freckle has different plans you can choose from with pricing ranging from $12.00 a month for one user and up to 10 projects, to $98.00 a month for a large amount of users and infinite projects. You can sign up for a free 30 day trial so you’ll know what works best for you.
The only thing I really saw missing from freckle is a way to set a timer to run and actually track your time for you. It’s fine that you can enter in your time but that still leaves the task of using another application that acts more like a timer. I’d love to see this feature integrated into freckle.
To learn more about freckle, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):
[wpvideo mSJZ4e8q]
[via WebWorkerDaily]
