New plugin, WP Time Tracker
Posted on July 1, 2013
As our team began to grow, tracking billable time became more and more important. I like the work we do, but I’m not a big fan of doing it for free. Shocker, right? We tried several online services for time tracking, but none were a great fit. We didn’t want to pay a monthly fee for a service that didn’t meet our needs. So that’s when we did what we normally do, we built a solution in WordPress.
Last year we built the first version of Time Tracker as a theme for WordPress. It served our purpose really well and also let us store all the data locally which would make it really easy to add additional functionality over time if needed it. We had a couple people who wanted to try using it, but we found that handing it off wasn’t as easy as it should have been. It required a few add-on plugins and needed a couple bits of customization under the hood. If we were going to make this available to the public, something needed to be done. So we kept the pieces we liked, rewrote the pieces we didn’t and a short time later, we had a plugin that was was better than the original solution.
Introducing WP Time Tracker
Simple. Our goal here is to keep things simple. WP Time Tracker is designed to let you easily track time for you, your staff and your contractors without being overly complicated. If you’re familiar with the WordPress admin panel (and I’ll bet you are), you’re going to find working with Time Tracker very familiar.
Adding clients is simple and works the same as adding categories to a post. Making it easy to access a list of all work done for a selected client.
The form for adding hours is uncluttered and gets right to the point. Select the date you did the work using a pop-up date picker, select the client, add a description and the amount of time spent and you’re done. Simple.
The plugin currently offers up two reports. The unbilled hours report seen here shows a list of all clients with hours waiting to be invoiced. There’s also a client history report that lists all clients and the total hours tracked for the life of the client.
When it’s time to bill a client, the create invoice page will let you see a list of all work performed for a selected client within a selected date range. (as a side note, and just to clear up any possible confusion, the ‘create invoice’ page does not generate or send an invoice to the client. It simply allows you to mark the items as invoiced. This may change in a future release.)
Add your staff or contractors as users on your site, and they’ll be able to add hours without having access to your reports.
Boom. Simple.
Purchase your copy of WP Time Tracker today!
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are the invoices a downloadable pdf? curious to this.
Hi Chris. In the current version, the plugin simply marks the hours as having been invoiced. It doesn't technically 'create' an invoice. That is, however, the #1 feature we're working on for the next release which we are hoping to have out in the next 30 days. Thanks for your interest!