Time Tracking? Billing?

[Tom Smyth]

What are folks using for time tracking? We are using Redmine. But wondering how best to integrate it with billing. Potentially open to changing issue tracking platforms if there is something awesome that does what we need.

We need something that can handle different rates per worker and project, and can integrate with Quickbooks Online.

Another option is to write a lightweight plugin for Redmine, but want to make sure there is nothing out there already.

Thoughts? Thanks!

--

Tom Smyth

Worker-Owner, Sassafras Tech Collective

Specializing in innovative, usable tech for social change 

sassafras.coop · @sassafrastech

Resident, Touchstone Cohousing

touchstonecohousing.org

[Mike Danko]

Redmine is good for being Redmine. If you need to integrate it, I'd write a lightweight plugin for Harvest, all the kids are using Harvest. Or just use Harvest and forgo Redmine integration. They really seem like different realms to me and that integration would be a nicety really. What's the need for Redmine integration? 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ann Arbor Ruby Brigade" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to a2rb+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to a2...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/a2rb.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Tom Smyth]

 What's the need for Redmine integration? 

Because all our time logging is connected to Redmine issues. We enter per-issue estimates in Redmine, track our progress against them, and give clients reports on each invoice showing how much time was worked on what. So the two are rather inextricable in our case...

Or maybe I'm thinking about this all wrong?

[Doug Drouillard]

Toggl

https://www.toggl.com/features

Doesn't seem like it has built-in quickbooks integration though. For straight up time tracking I don't think it can get much easier.

--

[Tom Smyth]

I appreciate all these recommendations for time tracking software. However, what we need is tight integration between our issue tracking and time tracking systems. Redmine does have time tracking that works fine for us, it's just that there is no concept of billing in there.

Am I asking too much? How do other people do this?

[Darren Gussin]

Look at http://www.freshbooks.com/

They have an API.

there is a redmine plug-in https://github.com/siliconsalad/Redmine-Freshbooks  it hasn't had much love in a couple of years

---

From: t...@sassafras.coop
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2015 08:55:09 -0400
Subject: Re: [a2rb] Time Tracking? Billing?
To: a2...@googlegroups.com

[Steve Schwartz]

Just to throw another recommendation into the pot, we use Redmine for issue tracking, and we use Cashboard (http://cashboardapp.com/) for estimates, time tracking, and invoicing.

We wrote a Redmine plugin to integrate with Cashboard, which allows us to import single or bulk tasks from Cashboard (e.g. tasks that were created from our estimates in Cashboard), and also export tasks with estimates from Redmine to Cashboard. We haven’t actually told anyone yet about our Redmine Cashboard plugin (except the creator of Cashboard, who really likes it and wants us to release it already), so it doesn’t have much uptake yet, but we’ve been using it in production for the better part of a year now, and it seems to work pretty well:

http://os.alfajango.com/redmine-cashboard-tasks/

Our usual work flow is:

1. Create an estimate in Cashboard, which contains tasks.

2. Create a deposit invoice from the Cashboard estimate.

3. Create a new project with tasks and estimates in Cashboard (a single button-click from the estimate).

4. Bulk-import the initial tasks with estimates into Redmine using the Redmine Cashboard plugin.

5. Add new one-off tasks in Redmine with estimates.

6. Export new tasks with estimates to Cashboard using the Redmine Cashboard plugin.

7. Track all time, create invoices, and collect payments in Cashboard.

-- Steve Schwartz

[Tom Smyth]

Very interesting Steve. I'll take a look.

Could summarize the key benefits of this approach over tracking time in Redmine and writing a plugin to send that data to Quickbooks, basically as I'm proposing?

How much did it cost you to build the Redmine plugin?

[Larry Siden]

toggle.com

[Steve Schwartz]

I’m not sure exactly how much it would have cost us to build the Redmine plugin or how much time we spent. I’m sure most of the time was spent figuring out how to write a Redmine plugin and work with the Cashboard API (though we already had a bit of experience with the Cashboard API with the client status dashboard we built). It’s open source, if you wanted to take a look here: 

https://github.com/alfajango/redmine-cashboard-tasks

And the commits here (you can see there’s not very many):

https://github.com/alfajango/redmine-cashboard-tasks/commits/master

-- Steve Schwartz

[Steve Schwartz]

Oh, and so I’m not completely skirting your question, if I had to guess, I’d say maybe it was a total of like 10 or 20 hours worth of research and work.

-- Steve Schwartz

[Tom Smyth]

Thanks again Steve. How about this question, which would be really awesome to understand: 

Could you summarize the key benefits of this approach over tracking time in Redmine and writing a plugin to send that data to Quickbooks, basically as I'm proposing?

[Steve Schwartz]

I'm not sure if there is a benefit. We were using Cashboard for estimates, time tracking, and invoicing long before we started using Redmine. At the time, we chose Cashboard because it was the only time tracking and invoicing application that could differentiate between employees and sub-contractors (even Harvest and Freshbooks couldn't do that back then), which affects the users' access and how their rate is logged for accounting.

If Redmine provides what you need in terms of time tracking and invoicing, you could probably just go that route.

-Steve

[Tom Smyth]

Great explanation. Thank you.