Time Tracking Just Got Better!

Another day, another round of awesome updates for you all. We love getting your suggestions and here are some more features that you requested.

We've just spent this week improving the time tracking functionality and making it easier for you to manage you and your team's time entries. We've also made some other improvements which we'll detail in this blog post, so read on...

Jump to a Date

Some of you said it was frustrating not to be able to jump to a specific date for time entries. Well we remedied that and added a date picker so you can just go straight to the day that you have time entries for. Just click the date button (looks like a little calendar) and then select your date.

Simple as that.

Hourly Rate by Task

This is a huge new feature we are very proud of and it allows lots of flexibility when charging for your projects. You can now set your hourly rate not just by project, but by individual task.

By default your tasks will inherit the hourly rate value set in the Add Project page, e.g. $50 per hour. If you track 10 hours across your team, then your project will come to $500.00 plus the value of any fixed price tasks you might have.

However, you might have some users (perhaps freelancers) who charge a different hourly rate. Simply edit the task and set their hourly rate in this Hourly Rate field (advanced options). This new value will override the default value, so when they track time for that task it will use that hourly rate, not the default project hourly rate. If you do this, make sure you only assign one user to that task so he/she is the only one tracking time for it.

Timer Now Filtered by User

Since our last update to time tracking the timer used to always show your time, regardless of whether you had selected a user in the dropdown above. We had a few of you email about this saying you expected the timer to reflect the time that the user had spent, not personal time, and also you needed it to aggregate all the time if you had "All Users" selected in the dropdown.

So we've added this ability. Timers now show the time spent on that task by the selected user.

However please note, if you want to track time yourself you'll need to make sure that your own name is selected in the dropdown above to enable this ability.

Edit Comments

Another little but very useful feature is the ability to edit comments. Previously you had to delete the comment and re-enter it, but we've just added the ability to edit comments that you post now in case you need to correct anything. You can also edit file attachments and add a comment to files already uploaded.

Just click the edit button towards the top right of the comment. Also note that we've simplified the way comments display now when clicking the comments link. You'll now be taken directly to the comments page with comments shown in date order.

Add-ons

We've tidied things up a little bit as you might have noticed. Here's what's changed:

• We've moved the permissions for Expenses, Estimates and Invoices in to a new section called Add-ons. To enable this functionality (or disable it) then hover over My Account, then click on Add-ons.
• We've removed the Contacts tab to save some space in the navigation area. To get to your contacts click on Clients, then Contacts underneath each tab.
• By default new accounts only have Invoices enabled as Add-ons, so remember this if you set up a new account because you'll need to enable them in the Add-ons section.
• We may put new Add-ons in this section in the future, so check back every so often.

Your existing settings won't have been affected so nothing to worry about.

Dashboard Notifications Take Priority

We've made the notifications take priority in the Dashboard now. Previously the Overview module took priority at the top, but some of you didn't find this as useful as the notifications. We agree that these should be the first things you see when you log in.

We hope you enjoy these new features!