Hours - Review 2022 - Winters Ingtheas

Freelancers, consultants, and others rely on time-tracking apps so that they can bill clients accurately and hands. The best time-tracking apps for freelancers are affordable and meet the needs of the individual or team, without going overboard. Hours, available online, for iOS, and on the Apple Watch, helps you and your teammates runway fourth dimension spent on tasks for clients. Still, it doesn't allow you lot manage hourly rates or expenses and can't connect to any invoicing tools other than FreshBooks Classic. Considering in that location are amend time trackers that offer more than features (some are fifty-fifty costless), it's non my top recommendation, unless you lot're dead-attack having Apple Watch compatibility. Consider Editors' Choices Toggl or Harvest instead.

Pricing and Comparative Prices

Hours costs $8 per person per calendar month or if you cull to pay annually, $80 per person per year. New members get a one-month complimentary trial. If, at the end of the trial, you choose not to pay for Hours, you tin keep using the iPhone app only, without losing any past data, though you lose web access. While it'south technically a free version of the app, it's extremely limited.

Hours' pricing is on the low side compared to other online time-tracking tools, which more often than not charge in the range of $eight to $12 per person per month. Note, however, that Hours doesn't include nearly as many features every bit most of the competition.

Toggl, for example, starts at $10 per person per month, and it lets you store billable rates for all the work you lot do, making information technology piece of cake to connect to an invoicing app and generate bills. Toggl too offers a free tier of service that'southward acceptable for many micro-businesses.

Harvest costs $12 per person per month, and information technology includes a complete invoicing and expense-tracking organization. Paydirt, some other strong competitor for its invoicing capabilities, starts at $eight per month for a single-user account and runs somewhere in the range of roughly $7 to $10 per person per month for squad accounts. Paydirt charges grouping rates (for example, a Small Teams account costs $49 per month for up to half-dozen members), which makes information technology tough to compare it head-to-head with other services' rates.

Some other time tracker called Freelancy costs $29.xc per person, but that'south a flat erstwhile fee, non an ongoing charge per unit. TopTracker is a totally free alternative to all these apps, although information technology's light on features.

All the apps I've mentioned and then far are definitely useful for freelancers, even if some of them are appropriate for pocket-sized and mid-size businesses, too. Larger businesses may find that they already accept fourth dimension-tracking tools included in other apps they employ. For case, employee monitoring software often includes fourth dimension-tracking, and the same can be said for projection management apps. Depending on the needs of the organization, information technology may be worthwhile to use a fourth dimension tracker that's already built into some other tool.

Setup and Interface

To create an Hours account, yous but need an email address and password. Hours runs in Chrome, Safari, or Firefox (also every bit the mobile versions of those browsers), and there are apps for iOS and Apple tree Watch equally well.

Once you set an account, you have an option to scout a brief video with an overview of the product. The app offers other tutorial videos as you acquaint yourself with the app, which is groovy for people who are unfamiliar with fourth dimension tracking.

Something that irked me during setup is that the pricing was not made bachelor to me until subsequently I created an business relationship. The prices are not publicly bachelor on the website, although I found them easily from an Upgrade option inside the app.

To get started, you create clients, projects, and tasks. Hours handles these elements differently than most other time-tracking apps in that tasks are independent of projects. Let'south say yous have a task chosen Research. In many time-tracking apps, you have to add Research as a specific chore to each project for which information technology is applicable. In Hours, all tasks are bachelor to assign to any project at whatsoever time. Hours is somewhat convenient in this style, though not as convenient as Toggl, which lets you type whatever chore into the timer, the moment yous want to time it, without having to first set it up at all.

Later on I prepare my clients, projects, and tasks, I idea I was set up to start timing my work, just not then. In Hours, you take to take yet some other step, that of creating timers.

In Hours, at that place isn't just 1 timer, simply rather a separate timer for each task you desire to fourth dimension. Worse, you have to create every single i of them. If a task is ever fully completed (sometimes work is ongoing, and sometimes it has a concrete end), you tin annal the associated timer.

The listing of timers refreshes each day, so when you log into Hours for the beginning time later on midnight, your timers all reset to zippo.

I don't mind the timers, but it does seem weird that you have to create them all. Many other fourth dimension-tracking apps create the list for you every time you lot start timing a new job. These apps then show you a list of all the tasks you lot've timed today so far. You tin generally too selection a task from the listing and resume timing it if needed. That's how information technology works in Toggl, Paydirt, and other apps. This whole business of having to create a unique timer for every task you want to time (and which yous've presumably already entered into your list of clients, projects, and tasks) is wearisome and unnecessary.

Features

Hours' timer page does offer some interesting functionality. At the very top, information technology shows a timeline view of your 24-hour interval, with spanner bars for dissimilar tasks that are color-coded to their project. If you need to adjust the time tracked for a job, you can do so past pulling or pushing the ends of the spanners. Yous can also manually edit the time in the listing.

Hours does back up collaboration, so information technology's a fine choice for a fourth dimension-tracking app if you piece of work with additional people and demand to track everyone's fourth dimension. Information technology doesn't let you lot associate billable hourly rates, still. Many collaborative time trackers allow yous salvage a default billable charge per unit for each member. Plus, y'all can usually enter a different rate for certain tasks. You might do and so, for example, if y'all charge one rate for building a website and a different rate for meetings. Hours doesn't have any of these tools at all, much less integrated invoicing.

You lot can view a dashboard and reports in Hours, and these are helpful for getting a sense of how you and your team members spend your time. It'south non nearly the same thing equally existence able to plow a month's worth of fourth dimension entries into a professional invoice, however, which some apps excel at doing. The leaders in that department are Harvest, Paydirt, and FreshBooks.

Integrations

Hours hardly offers any integrations with other apps and services. It can connect to FreshBooks Classic, but not the most current version of FreshBooks . It doesn't offering any other integration options at all. Every bit mentioned, you tin export data to a CSV file and import it elsewhere, only doing so isn't virtually as convenient or productive as natively connecting to apps.

Who's It for?

Using Hours makes sense if you lot are: 1) tracking time for your ain sake, or your team'south sake; 2) not billing clients by the hour; and three) really want a time-tracking app that works with Apple Watch. If you don't see those three criteria, you're better off using the free version of Toggle, which is an Editors' Pick.

If you do bill need invoicing and billing tools, consider Harvest, another Editors' Choice. And if Harvest doesn't meet your needs for some reason, I recommend considering Paydirt and FreshBooks.