hucke
04-09-2009, 10:52 AM
Hi all,
I'm primarily a contract programmer. My web hosting business is tiny, with only about ten customers, though I'm hoping to grow it.
What I'm in need of is a client management / billing / trouble ticket program that also has a time-tracking feature - as 99% of my income is programming hours billed to clients, which I account for by the minute.
I've experimented with a few desktop time-trackers, but didn't like them. KDE's time tracking module is very weak; it just records total minutes per project, without detail. Gnome's time tracker is more featureful, but it crashes far too often.
Thus I ended up writing my own web-based time tracker about a year ago, and have been using that; it also has the capability to add a non-time-related line item to an invoice, and I use this for hosting and miscellaneous charges. I'll add an item by hand, doing the description and price from memory ("2008 Q3 hosting for foobar.com, $60"), generate an HTML invoice, and email it - a labour-intensive process.
I'd like to go with something more polished, something that integrates with an ISP billing system and trouble ticket system, something I wouldn't be embarrassed to show to my clients.
Thus I'm looking for a billing system that handles all the usual ISP/Hosting billing functions - new service signup, trouble tickets, define hosting packages, monthly/quarterly billing, email receipts, etc.; and that can also track the time I spend working on my customers' sites.
Features I need in a time tracker:
- multiple clients
- multiple projects per client (one of my clients is another consulting firm that rents me out to their own clients...)
- multiple workers (me, my HTML guy, my technical documents writer, maybe more...)
- configurable hourly rate for each project/client and worker combination (for example, I charge client X $75 and client Y $60; my HTML guy charges $60 and $45 to those same clients);
- lots of detail for each task - with every timespan logged to the minute, and a description I add ("April 1, 10:13-14:03, 14:55-16:11, 16:40-18:04, worked on shopping cart checkout blah blah...")
- bundling up of tasks & time spans into invoice items on a weekly or monthly basis depending on client preferences.
Can anyone recommend a billing system with a good time tracking module, that supports these features?
Failing that - as I may be asking for something that doesn't exist - what billing systems have a good modular API such that I could write my own GPL'd time tracker module to add to it?
I'm primarily a contract programmer. My web hosting business is tiny, with only about ten customers, though I'm hoping to grow it.
What I'm in need of is a client management / billing / trouble ticket program that also has a time-tracking feature - as 99% of my income is programming hours billed to clients, which I account for by the minute.
I've experimented with a few desktop time-trackers, but didn't like them. KDE's time tracking module is very weak; it just records total minutes per project, without detail. Gnome's time tracker is more featureful, but it crashes far too often.
Thus I ended up writing my own web-based time tracker about a year ago, and have been using that; it also has the capability to add a non-time-related line item to an invoice, and I use this for hosting and miscellaneous charges. I'll add an item by hand, doing the description and price from memory ("2008 Q3 hosting for foobar.com, $60"), generate an HTML invoice, and email it - a labour-intensive process.
I'd like to go with something more polished, something that integrates with an ISP billing system and trouble ticket system, something I wouldn't be embarrassed to show to my clients.
Thus I'm looking for a billing system that handles all the usual ISP/Hosting billing functions - new service signup, trouble tickets, define hosting packages, monthly/quarterly billing, email receipts, etc.; and that can also track the time I spend working on my customers' sites.
Features I need in a time tracker:
- multiple clients
- multiple projects per client (one of my clients is another consulting firm that rents me out to their own clients...)
- multiple workers (me, my HTML guy, my technical documents writer, maybe more...)
- configurable hourly rate for each project/client and worker combination (for example, I charge client X $75 and client Y $60; my HTML guy charges $60 and $45 to those same clients);
- lots of detail for each task - with every timespan logged to the minute, and a description I add ("April 1, 10:13-14:03, 14:55-16:11, 16:40-18:04, worked on shopping cart checkout blah blah...")
- bundling up of tasks & time spans into invoice items on a weekly or monthly basis depending on client preferences.
Can anyone recommend a billing system with a good time tracking module, that supports these features?
Failing that - as I may be asking for something that doesn't exist - what billing systems have a good modular API such that I could write my own GPL'd time tracker module to add to it?