Where does time go? Now I know.

Running a design business poses a lot of challenges. One of the most obvious ones is that the bulk of your income is generated from the work that you charge for and, more often than not, that work is charged out on an hourly basis.

Keeping track of all the time we spent on a job used to be a real pain for us mostly because we weren’t disciplined enough to keep proper job sheets. This resulted in us often taking a very conservative estimate when it came to totaling up a bill. We’d think ‘Surely it didn’t take us 3 hours to render that piece of artwork’ or ‘Where did Tuesday go and why haven’t I finished anything?”.

Knowing where your hours are going is really very important. Be it billable hours or non billable hours you need to know what’s going on.

Over Christmas 2007 we decided we had better pull our socks up and get serious about tracking our time.  From the traditional job sheets, to stop watch systems and more complex software (which was just overkill) we tested a lot.
The best tool for the job was coincidentally the last system we tested. A web based tool from www.getharvest.com

Harvest have a wonderfully simple system for monitoring time and it’s ideal for a design business like Martian. It’s 100% web based, has a very low entry cost and can be operated with a single click via a very cool desktop widget. You can create your various customers, projects and tasks. Set up billable and non-billable tasks with varying rates and get a very accurate picture of where your precious time is being spent. It also does timesheets too. Nice :)

Overall we give Harvest two martian thumbs up!
If you are in an industry that needs to keep track of your time then you really should check out Harvest.

www.getharvest.com