Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by diminoten » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 8:19 PM UTC

tadmilbourn wrote: post #33

jprince wrote: post #31

Currently, I use On The Job, which works really well at invoicing and time tracking. What I do is I PDF the invoice and email it to clients, and have them pay me via Square Cash. As long as I don't do more than 2500$ of work for any particular client in a given week, they can easily use that. It costs them nothing and it costs me nothing to do this, and there is no percentages taken. Also, we both understand when pay…

Jprince, that's a nice setup. You've manually put together many of the core components Tiempo offers. It sounds like you're getting paid quickly, at low cost, and its a good experience for both you and your customers. In fact, what you could do is use Tiempo for your time tracking and use the result to create your PDF invoice and continue with your Square Cash payment process. Compared to On the Job, Tiempo's time tr…

Hackers like us forget how hard some of this stuff is to put together, and time consuming.

Once you've invested time into your homegrown system, your product inertia grows a great deal. "Why do x when you could just do y,z,a,b,c together?" should be a red flag to folks like us that we're not really suggesting something easier for other people, even if it's easier for us.

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

#42

Post by tadmilbourn » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 8:23 PM UTC

welder wrote: post #39

I like https://wakatime.com because it does the time tracking for me automatically so I don't have to use a timer app.

That's the ideal! The problem with time tracking is that the hours don't get captured in the first place. Automatic tracking greatly increases the likelihood that the time is captured. We'll do more to automate in the future. Our current focus on that front is integration with accounting systems as those tend to be a costly part of the process to the business (either time lost or money spent paying a bookkeeper).

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

#43

Post by tadmilbourn » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 8:27 PM UTC

tomasien wrote: post #35

jprince wrote: post #31

Currently, I use On The Job, which works really well at invoicing and time tracking. What I do is I PDF the invoice and email it to clients, and have them pay me via Square Cash. As long as I don't do more than 2500$ of work for any particular client in a given week, they can easily use that. It costs them nothing and it costs me nothing to do this, and there is no percentages taken. Also, we both understand when pay…

If you guys are interested in getting these costs down, my company KnoxPayments.com could help. Without credit card fees, it's easier to charge way less and still have a solid system.

Cool! Let's chat. I'll reach out to you.

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

#44

Post by Pistos2 » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 8:43 PM UTC

I read that page top to bottom, and was not motivated to switch from my current provider (Freshbooks), with which I am quite satisfied. I consider slowness of payment due to my clients, not my time tracking / invoicing tool.

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

#45

Post by romanhn » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 8:43 PM UTC

diminoten wrote: post #41

tadmilbourn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jprince, that's a nice setup. You've manually put together many of the core components Tiempo offers. It sounds like you're getting paid quickly, at low cost, and its a good experience for both you and your customers. In fact, what you could do is use Tiempo for your time tracking and use the result to create your PDF invoice and continue with your Square Cash payment process. Compared to On the Job, Tiempo's time tr…

Hackers like us forget how hard some of this stuff is to put together, and time consuming. Once you've invested time into your homegrown system, your product inertia grows a great deal. "Why do x when you could just do y,z,a,b,c together?" should be a red flag to folks like us that we're not really suggesting something easier for other people, even if it's easier for us.

Reminds me of this Dropbox critique when it first got featured on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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

#46

Post by Pistos2 » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 8:55 PM UTC

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 there might have arisen certain expectations from the client that would end up not being met.

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

#47

Post by fenguin » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 9:06 PM UTC

welder wrote: post #39

I like https://wakatime.com because it does the time tracking for me automatically so I don't have to use a timer app.

Huge fan of Wakatime here as well -- I usually work on more than one project simultaneously and it helps greatly that Wakatime tells me exactly how I've split my time between each repo.

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

#48

Post by ebahnx » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 9:09 PM UTC

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?

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

#49

Post by alpeb » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 9:20 PM UTC

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.

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

#50

Post by eswat » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 9:22 PM UTC

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.