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Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

tiempoapp.com

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Re: Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

#51

Post by [deleted] »

eswat wrote: post #50
pw wrote: post #38

This looks like a fine product and kudos to its creators, but I hate that products like this encourage bad practices for freelancers/consultants. Basically, if you're charging in way that requires software to track how much clients owe you, you're doing it wrong. Take the advice of tptacek and patio11 and charge by the day or the week, not the hour.

Yeah, which is a shame for good apps like FreshBooks and probably Tiempo that handle the other heavy lifting like invoicing but don’t play nice with a day/week workflow.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

#52

Post by toomuchtodo »

alpeb wrote: post #49
pw wrote: post #38

This looks like a fine product and kudos to its creators, but I hate that products like this encourage bad practices for freelancers/consultants. Basically, if you're charging in way that requires software to track how much clients owe you, you're doing it wrong. Take the advice of tptacek and patio11 and charge by the day or the week, not the hour.

Got any links to that advice? In my experience I prefer hourly billing, mostly because of the kind of clients I handle.

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

Control-F for "Charging Weekly: It Makes Everything Automatically Better"

Re: Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

#53

Post by eswat »

alpeb wrote: post #49
pw wrote: post #38

This looks like a fine product and kudos to its creators, but I hate that products like this encourage bad practices for freelancers/consultants. Basically, if you're charging in way that requires software to track how much clients owe you, you're doing it wrong. Take the advice of tptacek and patio11 and charge by the day or the week, not the hour.

Got any links to that advice? In my experience I prefer hourly billing, mostly because of the kind of clients I handle.

Here’s one from patio11: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

And if you don’t mind spending some change, I found the Double Your Freelancing Rate book to be a good read that really got me psyched about getting away from an hourly rate (so in my case it was definitely worth it): http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com

Re: Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

#54

Post by thenduks »

Looks very nice. I've been using timelyapp.com and this seems to cover my use-case similarly but free - yay!

A couple points of feedback:

- As a person who lives anywhere but the US, the date format is all wrong and will constantly be a source of annoyance. The datepicker helps, but the csv outputs dates like 07/08/14... I have no idea what date that is. How about ISO standards? 2014/07/08 is completely unambiguous to everyone.

- I often do a whole day of work. Say like 4+ hours for a single client. I write a lot of notes during that time for my own reference. So I really need to be able to: type notes while the timer is going, and also for the notes to respect my line breaks (otherwise it just comes out jibberish if I try to write bullet points/etc).

- I guess I will use the submitted->approved flow for pending->billed. Not sure if this is something you intend... I 'approve' my own hours, but I would like to be able to mark hours as having been billed so I don't accidentally do it twice :)

- The little bubble next to my entries says 'RF', I assume that's a place for an avatar. Am I blind and missing how to set one?

But yea overall it looks great!

Re: Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

#55

Post by tadmilbourn »

Pistos2 wrote: post #46
tadmilbourn wrote: post #2

We’re taking a slightly different approach to invoicing for billable hours. From talking with freelancers, independent contractors, agencies, and other professional services companies, we found that there’s a significant delay between when work is done and when the invoice actually goes out. Then, there’s even more delay between when that invoice goes out and when it gets paid. We’re trying to reduce both of those de…

The first thing that comes to mind is: While the time-spent entries I enter are usually exactly what ends up on invoices, on occasion, this is not the case. An entry might get edited (text description of work done, or even amount of time spent), or deleted, prior to generating the invoice and sending it. The concern here is that if clients are notified "too quickly" about time spent, updates would cause confusion, or…

That's one of the top concerns I have as well. But, as you point out, the majority of the time that's not the case. So far, we've found that the notifications provide better transparency than the more common "here's all the work I did over the last month." I recently had a case with our accountant where I received a bill 3 weeks after the work was done and I totally didn't remember it. I emailed her and then we got on the phone to talk about it. All of that is wasted time (and money).

Re: Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

#56

Post by tadmilbourn »

ebahnx wrote: post #48

I'm really excited to see Tiempo make waves. Time tracking has been a major pain that hasn't been adequately solved for a long time, so it's good to see some innovation here. Any thoughts on integrating with other accounting software in the future, like Xero?

Yes! We have an integration with QuickBooks Online already. Xero and ZenPayroll are next on our list. Another commenter mentioned Wave, so maybe we'll get to them before long.

Re: Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

#57

Post by tadmilbourn »

eswat wrote: post #50
pw wrote: post #38

This looks like a fine product and kudos to its creators, but I hate that products like this encourage bad practices for freelancers/consultants. Basically, if you're charging in way that requires software to track how much clients owe you, you're doing it wrong. Take the advice of tptacek and patio11 and charge by the day or the week, not the hour.

Yeah, which is a shame for good apps like FreshBooks and probably Tiempo that handle the other heavy lifting like invoicing but don’t play nice with a day/week workflow.

What are the differences that you see between a day/week workflow and an hourly one?

Re: Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

#58

Post by tadmilbourn »

thenduks wrote: post #54

Looks very nice. I've been using timelyapp.com and this seems to cover my use-case similarly but free - yay! A couple points of feedback: - As a person who lives anywhere but the US, the date format is all wrong and will constantly be a source of annoyance. The datepicker helps, but the csv outputs dates like 07/08/14... I have no idea what date that is. How about ISO standards? 2014/07/08 is completely unambiguous t…

Thanks! On your feedback:

- I apologize for our overly American design :-). We're based out of California, so we tend to build from that point of view first. Dates, Timezones, Language and Currencies are all things we'll have to deal with. Your CSV recommendation is easy enough to make in the meantime. Thanks for pointing it out!

- The timer will soon open while its running. It's a more complicated situation on mobile where taking notes after actually makes sense.

- There will be a "billed" status shortly to ensure that doesn't happen (we track that but haven't made it apparent in the user interface).

- Those bubbles are just begging to be filled! Another "coming shortly" feature. Having the person's face is actually an important factor in creating invoices that are more likely to be paid quickly.

Re: Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

#60

Post by JoshTriplett »

thenduks wrote: post #54

Looks very nice. I've been using timelyapp.com and this seems to cover my use-case similarly but free - yay! A couple points of feedback: - As a person who lives anywhere but the US, the date format is all wrong and will constantly be a source of annoyance. The datepicker helps, but the csv outputs dates like 07/08/14... I have no idea what date that is. How about ISO standards? 2014/07/08 is completely unambiguous t…

> How about ISO standards? 2014/07/08 is completely unambiguous to everyone.

Agreed; however, ISO 8601 is actually YYYY-MM-DD, not YYYY/MM/DD. So, 2014-07-08.

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