What You See is What You Get

Many time trackers are full of canned reports that can't be modified to suit your needs.

Tempo's time log interface lets you select any criteria - projects, people, tags, and date ranges - to create reports with exactly the information you need. The whole application instantly adapts by generating key statistics, charts, print views and file exports. If you need a similar report you can save it for later. You can even generate invoices from any report.

Timecards Suck. So Do Timers.

We've seen time trackers with a big grid where you fill in your hours each day. They're OK if you only work on one or two projects and don't care about the details. But they break down when daily responsibilities shift or you need to keep clients up-to-date on exactly what you're doing.

Fancy timers make nice eye candy, but don't fit into a real consulting flow. Does anyone really track time down to the second? What if you split focus across multiple tasks?

Yes, we said all that and a lot more! But in the face of overwhelming and consistent feedback from our users we put our thinking caps on and decided to re-invent the timer in a way that doesn't suck. The result is the "Workstream" release of Tempo and a new take on timers that we're really quite proud of. You stream information directly into Tempo as you start working on tasks. We track exactly how long you spend on each item as you make updates. There's no need to explicitly enter hours or manually track time.

The BIG Picture

When dealing with some time tracking tools it can be hard to see the forest through the trees.

Tempo's project dashboard gives you a high level, color coded (red/yellow/green) view of your actual project burn versus estimates. Or, you can instantly chart any time log report to visualize project or resource utilization and trends.

Tasks, Considered Harmful

Many systems are inflexibly task-centric, requiring you to bill a time entry to one task from a defined set. How can you presume to know every task on a project ahead of time? Or even maintain a fixed list in the face of ever changing requirements? Thinking of projects in terms of pre-defined fixed tasks is rigid at best and quickly leads to inaccuracies.

Tempo uses Tags instead. Sure, you can use tags to track tasks - but you can also do so much more. Add them on the fly with no upkeep, ad-related keywords, sub-projects, or anything else.

Social Awareness (It's About People)

If you're a freelancer or small business then you've either been a sub-contractor yourself or sub-contracted to someone else. You might work on a team with people from a different company every day. Most time trackers are setup so that one "all powerful" company owns everyone's time. This is a perversion of reality and often forces double entry into multiple systems.

Every Tempo user has an individual account so they own their time. With Tempo you can invite anyone to a project, even people on free plans. Time is shared between team members so that everyone can use the information for billing, estimation, and tracking. This eliminates the double billing penalty when you work with other Tempo users.

Real-Time

Most systems force you to login to their application to get up-to-date information. As a principal or project manager it makes keeping on top of project billing a painful and time consuming experience.

Not so with Tempo - all time entries are immediately available as RSS feeds. Subscribe to everything at once or create custom reports to view specific entries of real importance. Now you can review billing entries for your projects over morning coffee right next to Tech Crunch in Google Reader.