Review: On The Job – Time Tracking for the Mac

Before I became self-employed again. I looked for a time tracking application. I tried one on the iPad which was a complete waste of money. So, I decided to go back to time tracking on my Mac. At least I could evaluate the programs before buying. Over the years, I never found a program that I liked and eventually wrote my own little app. For various reasons, I was tracking time outside of QuickBooks (which I was using for account for my family’s LLC) and always ended up recording time and then generating invoices in QuickBooks. At that time, I didn’t need an app that also did invoicing, so finding a simple app was difficult. Now that things are different and I wanted to do invoicing in the time tracking app, finding the right tool became easier.

One evening I sat down and downloaded something like 10 Mac time tracking applications and gave each one a quick evaluation. I was willing to spend up to about $50, so that gave me a lot of choices. I settled on a program called On The Job. The interface is very utilitarian and Mac like, but its ability to create very professional looking invoices makes it a huge time saver for me.

You create clients and then jobs for the clients. Like many good Mac applications, you can organize things however you want. I created folders under each client for year, month and project (some clients have multiple projects that need to be tracked separately). I also created folders for the invoices (I do 1 invoice per client no matter how many projects). It allows you to round your time to the nearest 15 minutes (and a few other options). So far none of my clients has had issues with the way the invoices come out; I had one minor issue that I alerted the developer about and he said he might consider it for the future. The feature is that I work on the same task over many days and I’d like to just be able to record the task, start and stop the timer, and when the invoice is generated, have it create separate line items for each day. Say I work on bugs for 3 days straight, in the main view, I’d like to see Hours: 24, Start Date Monday, End Date Wednesday, but on the invoice have 3 lines.

The template editor for customizing invoices is very flexible and easy to use. I created a template, made a few tweaks and now I just crank out invoices every month with a few clicks. It also has this slick idle timer so if I start the timer and then walk away, when I come back, it asks me if I want to subtract my idle time.

Pros

• Idle timer acts as a reminder when you forget to turn off the timer.
• Flexible invoicing.
• Ability to organize client and projects in pretty much any way you want.
• Easily handle multiple clients with different rates.
• Can setup rounding separately for each client.

Cons

• Timer button from menubar is kind of useless for me due to my hierarchy of client, year, month, project. (At least the part to select a task.)
• Timing Sessions aren’t that useful to me as it lumps all the sessions for 1 task into 1 line item on the invoice; if it separated it out, it would work better for me.

Summary

On The Job is almost perfect for me. I’ve been using it every work day for the last 3 months and other than a few nits here and there, the app works flawlessly and is out of the way. I have it running just about all the time and it definitely works better (for me) than any other solution I’ve found. I know that other people have more complex time tracking and invoicing needs, but On The Job was well worth the $39 I spent on it.