MinuteDock – track time with Xero
I was talking with some people at the Xero Now’s the Time event this week and the question came up a few times as to when Xero would do time-tracking. The people asking were keen to use Xero but they rely heavily on tracking their time.
Time-tracking is one of those applications that everyone likes to be tailored to them. Some people track in six minute blocks, some people in days. Some like to enter their time weekly, others use timers and some like to use installed applications that monitor their work and when they’re away from their computer.
Over the past year, more and more great web-based applications have started integrating with Xero and a lot of these include time-tracking. For example Acclipse is a practice management system for accountants; WorkFlowMax and ProWorkFlow are powerful job and project management systems with built-in time-tracking; FreshBooks is a well known online invoicing system that provides time-tracking.
For a good number of users that don’t need the power of these systems, there’s now a very nice solution that just does time-tracking and does it well. MinuteDock is time-tracking for Xero. It pulls contacts from Xero, allows you to track time using a nifty Twitter style input, then pushes invoices back into Xero when you’re ready.
Watch this video to see how it works.
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7 comments
[...] pretty cool Time tracking tool called MinuteDock has recently launched out of Wellington and it plugs beauitfully into Xero so it makes it faster and easier than ever to, turn your time into [...]
Monkey
Just doubles the price of using Xero for a feature that should be included – As a system Xero will apeal to many freelancers and having to pay to track time is poor show, even manual entry of time format rather than quantitiy would be an advantage.
Tarch
@Monkey
Absolutely agree. This is the main reason I am forced to utilize Freshbooks in conjunction with Xero. If Xero added a good time tracking and reporting feature, I’d consider moving my invoicing to Xero… to save a few bucks (although I do love my Freshbooks). In the meantime, the Freshbooks ot Xero integration has been working very well.
Sorry @monkey but I disagree, time tracking is not needed by most businesses, although I agree that it IS required by almost all consultants / freelancers. So the Xero have got it right IMHO – make integration with time tracking apps easy for those who need it. On the cost front, users obviously see the value in the Xero offering with its current feature set, so time tracking should cost extra (either as an upgrade to standard Xero or via a third party like MinuteDock.
I’ll raise this issue over at http://www.xerousers.com and see what the consensus seems to be on this. My worry is that Xero try to be all things to all people and lose their magic.
I’m with you on this Adrian. I prefer the idea of a core product (accounts software) which works and add-ons for the extras which users want.
Great system … yet another reason why Xero leaves it’s Australian second generation competitors for dead!!
Now that just might get me to move to Xero! Very nice that it integrates. Was just searching for a time tracking solution and wondered about Xero.