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Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid
- pw 12y agoThis looks like a fine product and kudos to its creators, but I hate that products like this encourage bad practices for freelancers/consultants. Basically, if you're charging in way that requires software to track how much clients owe you, you're doing it wrong. Take the advice of tptacek and patio11 and charge by the day or the week, not the hour.
- alpeb 12y agoGot any links to that advice? In my experience I prefer hourly billing, mostly because of the kind of clients I handle.
- toomuchtodo 12y agohttps://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin... Control-F for "Charging Weekly: It Makes Everything Automatically Better"
- eswat 12y agoHere’s one from patio11: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin... And if you don’t mind spending some change, I found the Double Your Freelancing Rate book to be a good read that really got me psyched about getting away from an hourly rate (so in my case it was definitely worth it): http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com
- vellum 12y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420203
- eswat 12y agoYeah, which is a shame for good apps like FreshBooks and probably Tiempo that handle the other heavy lifting like invoicing but don’t play nice with a day/week workflow.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- tadmilbourn 12y agoWhat are the differences that you see between a day/week workflow and an hourly one?
- andrewfong 12y agoAs someone who used to bill in six minute increments, I can tell you that the smaller your billing increment is, the more life sucks. Tracking by the hour (or less) introduces a whole new level of mental overhead. Most people are pretty good at recalling the major items they worked on in a day -- and if they can't, they can usually reconstruct what happened by examining e-mail history, commit logs, work product, etc. It's a lot harder to recall how many hours you spent on something though. Based on personal experience at least, if I'm not actively using a timer or using some kind of software that records what I'm doing in real time, my personal recollection tends to be way off. Even when I am using a timer, I often run into issues like forgetting to turn off the timer when I take a gym or coffee break. There's also all sorts of performance anxiety when it comes to hourly tracking. Not all hours are equal. I'm personally way more productive in the morning than I am right after lunch. But as far as invoicing goes, an hour's an hour. So I can either feel guilty about billing two hours for something that should have taken only one or I can write an hour off, which introduces even more overhead. With daily or weekly billing, a lot of that gets smoothed out.
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThanks for the context... did you have agreements with your client where you billed them by the day or week? If so, did you still have to "itemize" your day and provide some record of what you did? Did you ever work for multiple clients over the course of a single day? Sorry for the barrage of questions, just trying to better understand the use case and think of potential solutions.
- bronson 12y agoIt sounds like you live in an ideal world. I often help different clients in the same day. Website bugfix in the morning, bring up bluetooth in the afternoon. It's hard to say ahead of time how long either task will take. Am I supposed to look over my commits at the end of the week and guess a weekly amount for each client? That sounds awful for everybody. Sometimes you can bill weekly, sometimes you need more granularity. (I use hours.) And, no, I'm not doing it wrong.
- stanmancan 12y agoI believe part of the idea is not to take on jobs that are an hour here or there, but to take on work that requires full days or weeks. Your daily/weekly wouldn't change from customer to customer.
- bronson 12y agoOh, I understand the ideal. I just don't like telling clients, "live with that problem until you've built up a full week of issues for me." If I can take an hour to fix a previous project, and spend the rest of the day on a new project, that makes everyone happy. Except people who think that billing by the hour is 100% wrong I suppose.
- prawn 12y agoDoing it wrong or just doing things a different way? There are thousands and thousands of businesses out there with web site needs that just don't justify day or week rates for their maintenance partners. I might work on 8+ different projects in any given day and receive emails/calls from 20+ clients about tasks needing to be done. It can be brutal but I don't know that it's "doing it wrong". Over time, I could transition to clients that mean I might bill daily/weekly but none of them would be my current clients and these current clients would still need someone to provide that service at a level with finer granularity.
- welder 12y agoI like https://wakatime.com https://wakatime.com because it does the time tracking for me automatically so I don't have to use a timer app.
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThat's the ideal! The problem with time tracking is that the hours don't get captured in the first place. Automatic tracking greatly increases the likelihood that the time is captured. We'll do more to automate in the future. Our current focus on that front is integration with accounting systems as those tend to be a costly part of the process to the business (either time lost or money spent paying a bookkeeper).
- fenguin 12y agoHuge fan of Wakatime here as well -- I usually work on more than one project simultaneously and it helps greatly that Wakatime tells me exactly how I've split my time between each repo.
- tadmilbourn 12y agoWe’re taking a slightly different approach to invoicing for billable hours. From talking with freelancers, independent contractors, agencies, and other professional services companies, we found that there’s a significant delay between when work is done and when the invoice actually goes out. Then, there’s even more delay between when that invoice goes out and when it gets paid. We’re trying to reduce both of those delays as much as possible. By sending a notification once hours have been approved, we remove the delay between when the work is done and when someone “runs invoicing.” By making the notification personable and easily viewed on mobile devices, we increase the speed with which the customers pay. That’s the general concept! I’d love to hear any feedback and comments the HN community has!
- davedx 12y agoIn my experience as a contractor, the payment period is usually in the contract. The terms I've seen the most are 30 days and my current contract is 35 days. No amount of reducing friction will reduce that payment period. I know of one contractor who negotiated a higher rate by increasing the period. Companies typically run long invoice cycles, and you don't stand a chance of changing that to anything shorter usually.
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThat's a fair point. It's going to be tough to change those types of companies because they tend to have people that manage and optimize cash flow (i.e. pay bills on the last day possible without incurring penalties). From our experience with small businesses Intuit (the Tiempo team is all former Intuit employees), we know there's a large swath of companies that aren't as complicated or as rigorous. For those companies, just getting the bill taken care of and out of the way is a benefit. Those are the companies we'll focus on first.
- Pistos2 12y agoThe first thing that comes to mind is: While the time-spent entries I enter are usually exactly what ends up on invoices, on occasion, this is not the case. An entry might get edited (text description of work done, or even amount of time spent), or deleted, prior to generating the invoice and sending it. The concern here is that if clients are notified "too quickly" about time spent, updates would cause confusion, or there might have arisen certain expectations from the client that would end up not being met.
- yzap 12y agoThe design looks top notch and beyond that, it looks like you've really identified a specific part of the time tracking/invoicing workflow that has not yet been solved well and you have come up with a solution that completely nails that pain point. Great work guys! : )
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThanks! We appreciate it.
- cheez 12y agoDo you guys have any kind of API?
- tadmilbourn 12y agoOur API is not publicly available yet. Do you have any thoughts on what you'd want to use it for?
- cheez 12y agoWhen I use Toggl's API, I use it for creating time entries and getting project info. If your app is RESTful, then you wouldn't need to do anything further.
- CodeJackalope 12y agocheez, we have a RESTful API that drives our site and mobile apps. But data security is a top priority for us and we have not yet built the authorization systems to open up access beyond our own clients. That said, an API is high on our list and we want to make it as easy as possible for our users to enter time in whatever ways make sense for their workflows. Thanks for checking us out!
- cheez 12y agoYep, looks like you guys use XSRF which would make it a little more difficult I think.
- yarri 12y agoIntegration with accounting software, like Wave[0] [0] http://docs.waveapps.io/index.html http://docs.waveapps.io/index.html
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThat's a great idea! We've already built an integration with QuickBooks Online. And, we're working on integrations with Xero and ZenPayroll. We can add Wave to the list.
- pc86 12y agoI see in one of the screenshots there is a 3.9% fee - is that your fee as well as credit card processing?
- kkilat 12y agoYep, that's Stripe's 2.9% credit card processing fee, and then 1% that we take. Our goal in the future is to open up and accept other online payment options that have lower overall fees, as well though. We definitely want you to keep as much of the money you've earned as possible, and get it as fast as possible!
- tghw 12y agoThis service is worth 1% of my income? On top of 2.9% fees? For some reason, I have trouble believing that it'd be worth my while.
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThat's what we're hoping to prove. We've had early customers get paid in less than an hour (compared to 3-4 weeks). It was worth the 1% to them to get their money (averaging about $2,000) faster. Now, with increased traffic and user from things like this Show HN, we're hoping to show that we can sustain those positive early indicators at greater scale.
- bnejad 12y agoYou may want to make that clear somewhere on your website. I don't want to click "Try Now" before I can see the terms/pricing/etc
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThanks! That's an oversight on our part. We'll make that more clear in the next iteration of that page.
- pc86 12y agoAnything that supports ACH would be good for payments to agencies or consultancies which can often be $15-20k or more. I know Dwolla is one but I'm sure there are others. It would also be nice to have the option to add the fee to the invoice rather than pay it out of gross. Meaning for a $100 invoice, add $3.90 to it so that I get $100 after all fees. Most clients would never go for that but on smaller invoices you can often charge reasonable processing fees. Certainly wouldn't work for $400+ in fees, though :)
- Pvt_Hudson 12y agoIs this available outside of the United States?
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThe time tracking aspect works anywhere (there are apps for iOS and Android as well). For invoicing, to accept payment, we're currently set up to work with US Bank Accounts. Your customers can pay you as long as they have a credit card. Over time, we want to be as globally available as possible. That means more countries and more methods to pay.
- Pvt_Hudson 12y agoThanks! This looks promising.
- tijs 12y agoIs it normal in the US to pay supplier invoices through credit card payments? Nobody would pay 3,9% on amounts of more than a few hundred dollars right? A normal project invoice for say a web studio would usually be well over 10k which means you're regularly paying more than $400 to get a single invoice processed? Am i missing something or do people actually do this? Not trying to be snarky, truly curious.
- davedx 12y agoIn my limited experience, it's not usual. My US clients have paid with Paypal, bank transfer and check.
- tijs 12y agoLet's just say that compared to 0$ for a bank transfer (at least where i'm from) it seems like a bad deal.
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThose are all payment methods we plan to support in the future. Bank Transfer and Check don't have the same kind of processing costs, so that will allow us to do the payments for something more like 1% instead of 3.9%. We also hope to make the process of setting up and verifying those accounts less of a pain.
- megablast 12y ago1% is still way to much for something like this. Maybe a yearly fee of $100.
- tadmilbourn 12y agoGreat points. We've actually talked to folks whose total fees were about 6% after all was said and done. It's crazy, but it does happen. In your example, what I'd ask is if the web studio would be willing to pay $400 to get that $10k weeks earlier than they otherwise would have. That might be a good cash flow outcome for them. All that being said, you're exactly right, the fee structure makes transactions of a certain size not make sense if you're doing more regular invoicing. That's why we want to add more payment methods over time that are lower cost.
- jprince 12y agoCurrently, I use On The Job, which works really well at invoicing and time tracking. What I do is I PDF the invoice and email it to clients, and have them pay me via Square Cash. As long as I don't do more than 2500$ of work for any particular client in a given week, they can easily use that. It costs them nothing and it costs me nothing to do this, and there is no percentages taken. Also, we both understand when payment is due, and normally the client pays on the due date. If they don't pay on the due date no amount of pretty software is going to make them more likely to, for obvious reasons. How do you plan to get me to give away 3.9% of my income to use a more integrated service?
- tadmilbourn 12y agoJprince, that's a nice setup. You've manually put together many of the core components Tiempo offers. It sounds like you're getting paid quickly, at low cost, and its a good experience for both you and your customers. In fact, what you could do is use Tiempo for your time tracking and use the result to create your PDF invoice and continue with your Square Cash payment process. Compared to On the Job, Tiempo's time tracking is free and available on mobile devices. So you wouldn't have to be attached to your computer to track time. But, what Tiempo Instant Invoices does is allow folks that aren't as technical to get all of that benefit that you've already wired together in one place. And, as I've said elsewhere in the comments, we'll add more payment options (that are lower cost) in the future.
- diminoten 12y agoHackers like us forget how hard some of this stuff is to put together, and time consuming. Once you've invested time into your homegrown system, your product inertia grows a great deal. "Why do x when you could just do y,z,a,b,c together?" should be a red flag to folks like us that we're not really suggesting something easier for other people, even if it's easier for us.
- romanhn 12y agoReminds me of this Dropbox critique when it first got featured on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- jetro223 12y agoI also run a time tracking service (http://www.spiketime.net http://www.spiketime.net <- sorry, I had to ;-)) and just tried Tiempo. I really like the idea of instant invoices and the approval process (just the fee is a little bit high, I think). Some random thoughts: - What's the difference between an employee and contractor - is it just the label or do they have different rights in your app? - When you start the mobile app for the first time without using the website before you don't know the meaning of the icons for draft, submitted and approved (I thought the icon for approved was the save-button). - When using the timer I can't select a customer/service when the timer runs as you do this when you click stop timer. Also it isn't possible to make any notes on a running timer
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThanks for the feedback! And there's no shame in that plug. Employee and Contractor don't have much difference within Tiempo in terms of rights. But, they have profound differences with how they're treated once you integrate with accounting software like QuickBooks Online. We plan to get rid of the "Draft" status as it's underused and will allow us to simplify the design further (just Submitted and Approved status). The timer not allowing for details until it's stopped is something we'll address shortly.
- Pistos2 12y agoI read that page top to bottom, and was not motivated to switch from my current provider (Freshbooks), with which I am quite satisfied. I consider slowness of payment due to my clients, not my time tracking / invoicing tool.
- ebahnx 12y agoI'm really excited to see Tiempo make waves. Time tracking has been a major pain that hasn't been adequately solved for a long time, so it's good to see some innovation here. Any thoughts on integrating with other accounting software in the future, like Xero?
- tadmilbourn 12y agoYes! We have an integration with QuickBooks Online already. Xero and ZenPayroll are next on our list. Another commenter mentioned Wave, so maybe we'll get to them before long.
- thenduks 12y agoLooks very nice. I've been using timelyapp.com and this seems to cover my use-case similarly but free - yay! A couple points of feedback: - As a person who lives anywhere but the US, the date format is all wrong and will constantly be a source of annoyance. The datepicker helps, but the csv outputs dates like 07/08/14... I have no idea what date that is. How about ISO standards? 2014/07/08 is completely unambiguous to everyone. - I often do a whole day of work. Say like 4+ hours for a single client. I write a lot of notes during that time for my own reference. So I really need to be able to: type notes while the timer is going, and also for the notes to respect my line breaks (otherwise it just comes out jibberish if I try to write bullet points/etc). - I guess I will use the submitted->approved flow for pending->billed. Not sure if this is something you intend... I 'approve' my own hours, but I would like to be able to mark hours as having been billed so I don't accidentally do it twice :) - The little bubble next to my entries says 'RF', I assume that's a place for an avatar. Am I blind and missing how to set one? But yea overall it looks great!
- tadmilbourn 12y agoThanks! On your feedback: - I apologize for our overly American design :-). We're based out of California, so we tend to build from that point of view first. Dates, Timezones, Language and Currencies are all things we'll have to deal with. Your CSV recommendation is easy enough to make in the meantime. Thanks for pointing it out! - The timer will soon open while its running. It's a more complicated situation on mobile where taking notes after actually makes sense. - There will be a "billed" status shortly to ensure that doesn't happen (we track that but haven't made it apparent in the user interface). - Those bubbles are just begging to be filled! Another "coming shortly" feature. Having the person's face is actually an important factor in creating invoices that are more likely to be paid quickly.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago> How about ISO standards? 2014/07/08 is completely unambiguous to everyone. Agreed; however, ISO 8601 is actually YYYY-MM-DD, not YYYY/MM/DD. So, 2014-07-08.
- 12y ago
- akadruid1 12y agoName is too similar to Tempo (tempoplugin.com)
- ultimatedelman 12y agoanyone else getting scrollbars distorting the page size when hovering over the "advance" arrow on the right side?
- member345 12y agoyes, on Chromium/Xubuntu
- nathan_f77 12y agoLook forward to seeing your ZenPayroll integration!
- tadmilbourn 12y agoAwesome! Make sure to click the "I want this!" button on the Settings page in Tiempo. Then you'll be on our contact list as we further flesh out the integration.
- vesh 12y agoI currently use Harvest for time tracking, creating invoices and sending it out. It would be nice to see a list of features and costs without signing up. It looks like time tracking, approval is free to use. Connecting to Quickbooks costs 10$/month. To create and send invoices you have to choose to receive payments through Tiempo, which will cost 3.9% of the invoice amount. Customers get an option to pay by credit card. I can see this simplifies the process for a lot of people. Being able to send invoices without using the payment service is personally a deal breaker as it would be way higher than the 19$ I currently pay.