In a business, time is of the essence. When you work for a company your use of your time can affect your salary. If you are working for yourself, how you use it can impact your earnings.
Time needs to be scheduled and tracked; whether it’s to be done for tasks, teams, or individuals. That’s the purpose of time-tracking apps.
It’s also advisable to use tools or applications that can help you save time. A few minutes saved here and there can add up to hours, and over time, many hours. There are also apps that automatically generate reports or prepare and submit invoices. These can be genuine timesavers.
Any tool that replaces manual pen-and-paper accounting makes your life easier. It is a good one to have at your fingertips.
Here are 9 of the best time tracking, accounting, and invoice management apps on the market.
FreshBooks is an accounting app for small service-oriented businesses. It’s ridiculously easy to use and a great time saver when used for time tracking, managing expenses, producing financial reports and working with clients and contractors.
Its key features include:
A proposal generation capability to help you prepare an outline, the scope, and a timeline of a project as part of an estimate for a client. Choose a style and format and stick with it or make changes when needed.
FreshBooks’ iOS mobile app lets you help track by expenses by photographing receipts with your phone and storing the images for future use.
It typically takes 30 seconds or less to create and send a clean, professional-looking invoice featuring your own logo and color scheme; plus, you’ll be notified when the recipient has viewed it.
When it’s time to submit an invoice, FreshBooks will tell you what you did for your client and when.
Jibble is a cloud-based time and attendance tracking app for team leaders, with features that team members can profit from as well. Timesheets and reports can be provided on demand or automatically scheduled for daily, weekly, or monthly releases. The weekly and monthly timesheets are especially helpful during payroll review exercises.
Timesheets and reports can also be exported and downloaded in spreadsheet formats for accounting purposes. Personal timesheets and reports containing information entered by team members can also be generated.
Jibble also calculates hourly attendance statistics including average daily and weekly hours, average in and out clocking times, and issues alerts if the hours or times reported appear to contain any discrepancies.
Other features include Slack integration, activity tracking for job costing and productivity initiatives, client billing, and the ability to track multiple project teams and team activities.
Invoice Plane designers targeted self-employed workers, freelancers, and small to medium businesses when creating this invoicing and client management app. You can download and host this free open source software solution on your own server, although its authors recommend you download the demo first.
100,000+ downloads in 193 countries suggest that Invoice Plane has been well received and used by businesses and individuals looking for an easy and effective way to manage their billing cycles, as well as their clients (contact information and notes).
You can easily customize Invoice Plane’s themes and formats to suit your business model and workflow needs. Invoice Plane is multilingual, with more languages continually being added, and is integrated with 25 payment providers including PayPal and Stripe.
TimeCamp is a time and attendance tracking software and invoicing application you can use from your desktop browser or as a mobile app. It integrates seamlessly with accounting, project management, and helpdesk software packages to keep your billing cycle on track.
TimeCamp will track workforce attendance including days off and vacation days. Its SOLO package for individual users and freelancers is yours free of charge.
AND CO from Fiverr is a beautiful, free, and ridiculously simple to use app that’s perfect for studios and freelancers. It will efficiently handle your invoicing (send one in 20 seconds or less), time tracking, and payments chores and help prepare customized proposals as well.
AND CO is also a task management and a task management tool. In short, it’s an absolutely free app you can rely on to run your entire business.
Hiveage is an invoicing billing and reporting software application that can save a small business up to 80 hours per month once it switches over from manual or semi-automated processes.
With Hiveage, you can easily track task time and expenses (including mileage) with ease, prepare quotations, create invoices and have access to more than a dozen payment gateways to help your clients make payments online.
Invoice Ninja is a suite of apps freelancers can use to track task time, prepare and submit invoices, and provide clients with the means to easily make payments online with its access to 40+ payment gateways.
Invoice Ninja’s Kanban boards will assist you in managing your projects as well. Best of all, all these capabilities can be yours at no cost.
If you are a provider of professional or creative services Scoro offers an ideal solution to your business management needs. You can view any project on a single page, see team members’ schedules on the team calendar, track expenses, track actual and billable hours spent on a project or for a client, and automatically transfer the billing information to an invoice.
Scoro is a great alternative to having to rely on multiple tools to accomplish the same work.
Minterapp was designed with startups and small businesses in mind. This online time tracking tool will automatically track the time spent on a project or task and generate an invoice on demand and with a single click.
Minterapp also keeps track of draft, pending, or paid invoices. This app can also be used to create project estimates for delivery to clients.
Conclusion
You can be a freelancer, a small business owner, or a team leader working for a large company. Either way, there’s an app here that should fit your needs. Track time or attendance, prepare and send invoices, or arrange for client payments. You can also schedule projects or all the above.
You should have no problem finding an app that’s a good fit for your business needs. Each one here can be easily customized to provide precisely what you need, when you need it.
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