As a freelancer, my ongoing success depends on my ability to get paid for my work. As such, an accurate and flexible time tracking software is quite possibly the most critical software function in my business. I cannot accurately bill my clients without it. My Hours does everything I need it to do, and is in an easy to use and functional format with a clean, uncluttered interface. It's become an indispensable tool for me.
Pros
There was very little learning curve. I had changed to My Hours from an old tracking software from another vendor (which I had used for many years) and was initially concerned that I would lose productivity when switching to the new software. But I was wrong. I was up and running in less than an hour.
Once I got it running, I quickly realized that it was more flexible than the old software I had been using and would enable me to do everything I was accustomed to doing with the old software but with none of the problems that drove me to change. It's been a painless and seamless change to using My Hours.
Cons
At first the user interface took some getting used to, and some of the features were in unfamiliar or unintuitive places, but that quickly became a non-issue for me. And the company is always making incremental improvements.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Absolutely love My Hours & have for years! I am a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and have a free TSheets account, and have used many different time trackers over the years, I prefer My Hours. If I had a team I might need the features of TSheets, but since it's just me, My Hours is perfect, and free. I love the simplicity and it gives me everything I need. Love the dashboard that shows me my average billable hours per day, and my average hourly rate. I've set up projects/tasks for unbillable time as well as billable, so the dashboard is invaluable in showing me how productive my time is.
Pros
Free version has everything I need without a bunch of things I don't. Love the dashboard!
Cons
Can't remove unused columns, such as status & invoiced, from activity report
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Response time of MyHours is amazing. You click, it starts. Some other software are simply too slow to process information or start tasks and I'm always wondering if the task timer has started or not. Also, this UI actually incites you to take notes which is never something you do naturally because, at that moment, you KNOW what you are working on. However, two months down the line, when the client says "what is this 4h30 log there ??", you can respond clearly "Oh you called me and you procrastinated for hours before making a decision, that's why it took so long dude !" :))
Pros
- Its user interface is pretty, fast-reacting, intuitive. It takes no time to understand how it works.
- You can assign the same task to various projects, which is pretty cool : the fact that I have several projects where the same tasks apply (I manage a client's clients and for each of them, I have translations, website audit, profile analysis to do... So it's great to create the task once and for all and assign it to each sub-client).
- With the invoicing feature, you can see immediately what's been invoiced, what's to be invoiced. As a freelancer, this is great as you don't necessarily invoice all your clients at the end of a month. Some yes, but some are invoiced at the end of a project. No looking around, exports, calculations, to see who needs to be invoiced.
- Because of how it's set up, unless you are really not focused, it's pretty impossible to have logs that don't correspond to a project and a client. My previous time tracking softwares were leaving me with unidentified logs that kept me wondering for hours on what project / task I worked three weeks ago, at 1.21am !! :) I ended up deleting logs because I had no clue if it was a mistake or a real work log...
- You can set up hourly rates per task or per project or per team member. That comes in handy because, in my case, I have different clients that I charge differently. And within the same client, I also have different rates depending on the project.
- Pricing is spot on.
Cons
Liking "least" is not how I would define it... I would say there is room for improvement in a couple of areas that are, right now, not critical for me (but might be for others):
- No integration (that I know of) with productivity software / project management software (Asana, Basecamp, Monday, Slack, Airtable, etc...). For some, it will prove a bit wasteful to have tasks in those apps and to have to repeat them in MyHours.
- Filtering is limited. For example, I have two clients that are close partners and even though I invoice them separately, projects are intertwined. I need to group those two clients together when I report and analyze time spent on projects. Right now, I can only filter one client at a time and I would appreciate filter where you can multiple select.
- Like all time trackers I know, MyHours also doesn't provide a really great to have feature : providing a read only view for clients of logs applying to them. For example, one of my clients for whom I work on a daily basis needs to know my "count" for the month at any given time, so he knows if he can give me more work or not, since we are on an hours package basis... Having a permanent URL where he can check on his own where I'm at and what I've worked on and how long would avoid time wasted for him asking me and time wasted for me telling him :)
Hi Nadege,
thank you so much for your kind review.
Below are my short comments:
1. We are indeed slow on the integrations part. Will improve on this front very soon.
2. You can, in fact, select multiple projects or clients in reports. Maybe it is not straightforward enough. Please, contact support to learn how.
3. Shared reporting would make total sense, thanks.
Thank you for your suggestions and kind words.
Miha
My Hours Team
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
This has allowed me to keep detailed billing records for a handful of my freelance clients. There is so much flexibility that I could easily use it even for flat fee projects. It is simple to set up and almost mindless to use, yet it feels very robust. I've never felt a feature is missing. After trying countless competitors, including some very expensive industry software, I'm still convinced this is the best choice. And as my business grows, there's plenty of room to upgrade and expand the uses. Also, and importantly, customer service is wonderful. One weekend, I stupidly locked myself out of my account but changing the email address to one I no longer use or have access to. I still don't know what I did, but CS responded within hours. They found my account even though none of the info I'd provided was accurate. They completely saved my weekend! And they didn't even make fun of me for the mistake! Through all my experiences, I've become a huge fan of My Hours. I'm happy to talk to anyone who is considering it.
Pros
This software is simple to set up and use. I don't waste any time setting up a new project. Once I've entered the client, I just start timing and go.
I usually use the free version. I don't do a lot of hourly billing in my freelance career. So, I track projects and then add up the hours to create my own invoices in WorD. This service allows me to keep permanent detailed records, and my clients know they can ask for the information if they want to review how I spend my time.
If I take on more than the small handful of clients I currently have, I plan to upgrade to a paid account so I am able to generate invoices and have more clients. But for a basic user, this is the best service I've found. And I've tried them all.
Note, I used to be an attorney in a small practice. I would have used this constantly in my billing had I known about it.
Cons
I sometimes forget to hit start or stop because there is no window hovering over my workspace. Other than that, I honestly have no complaints. It suits my needs perfectly.
Dear Kristen,
Thank you very much for your positive review.
We are very happy to hear our service is valuable to you and that our support was able to save your weekend :)
All the best,
The My Hours Team
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Our old time recording system ceased to be supported so we had to find a new one. We looked at lots of alternatives and ran a new one for almost a year but it was dreadful. Lots of systems want to manage your whole practice rather than just log time so finding My Hours was a real relief. We run it alongside Xero and our CRM both of which we didn’t want to change. Apart from niggles as above this has been a great system for us.
Pros
It’s great to be able to log time as you work, whether in the office or in the move. I’m sure being easy to do so means we capture more chargeable hours than we did using our old (very annoying) system.
Cons
Overall this is a great product but I have a few niggles which I hope might get sorted out. I don’t like that time is logged to the second rather than whole minutes or nearest 5 minutes - it makes us look money grabbing. Not being able to set up a new chargeable project without having to go into a more detailed screen is annoying and no longer having a link back to the time record from a time report is slowing us down. I don’t like the time report layout as you have to look for the client name and project name - our old original system included a header with this detail which made for better client presentation.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Free: 0$ free for solo users
Pro: 6$ per user / per month (billed annually)
Pro: 7$ per user / per month (billed monthly)
