Blogging has been very light the last few weeks – this is usually a sign I’m working on something big, in this case it’s the next version of yaTimer – my time tracking tool.
First, the standard disclaimer, this post is about an unreleased version of yaTimer, nothing is final until the software is actually released.
yaTimer 2.2 will be a free upgrade for all current customers.
yaTimer version 2.2 is almost ready – and it’s a big update:
Billing
<>In this version I’m introducing the first set of billing related features, you can set a fixed task cost or an hourly rate and yaTimer will happily track how much you need to charge and print bills.
You can also mark a task as not billable and filter the reports to show only billable tasks (or only not billable if you like, or both).
This is just the beginning, there are a lot more billing features planed for the future.
Estimation
Another “tip of the iceberg” feature is time estimation, in this version you can enter your estimate when you create a task and view a nice graph of estimated vs. actual time when the task is complete.
Like the billing features this is just the beginning.
Reports
First, all the problem with printing and comments are finally solved, the comments are now printed correctly in all reports and in for every report where comments are truncated or not shown there is a version that will print the full comments.
But the feature that takes the report into the next level is grouping – you can select to group any report by client or project.
Also there are some new reports, the new version has a total of 17 reports and many of the old reports have been improved or fixed.
The User Interface
The biggest user interface improvements is grouping in the task list, you can group your tasks by client, project or color and the task list will be sorted with a header for each group and a small +/- button you can use to hide and show groups.
The pause all tasks button on the toolbar can now also resume all tasks – so if you are working on something and have to take a break you click the pause all button and when you return another click will continue from the point you left off.
There is also a new reset all button, you can set yaTimer to start automatically when you log on and many other small improvements and fixes.
I’m working hard making yaTimer the best and easiest to use time tracking software available, and I believe this version is a big step forward, the version is now in final testing and if there are no show-stopper issues will be released later this week or next week.
posted @ Tuesday, May 13, 2008 6:08 PM