Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid
tiempoapp.com
tiempoapp.com
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?
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.
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.
Control-F for "Charging Weekly: It Makes Everything Automatically Better"
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
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.
Sorry for the barrage of questions, just trying to better understand the use case and think of potential solutions.
- You get away from commodity-based pricing, which is huge and makes charging clients what you’re actually worth a lot easier - No anxiety about what’s considered billable work or how efficient you should be since more efficiency == less billable hours - Don’t have to use a time tracker app, so more time spent on doing actual work than micro-managing your time
Hope that helps. There’s a plethora of value-based pricing out there too!
(I run a product, Planscope, which supports daily/weekly billing for budget tracking, but we don't have invoicing... yet.)
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.
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.
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.
Maybe a yearly fee of $100.
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.
Please mention this up front!
When you add a calendar overview and a more sane pay structure, I'm happy to look again. Thanks.
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!
- 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.
Agreed; however, ISO 8601 is actually YYYY-MM-DD, not YYYY/MM/DD. So, 2014-07-08.
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!
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.
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.
Great work guys! : )
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
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.
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.
Over time, we want to be as globally available as possible. That means more countries and more methods to pay.
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!
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.
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 :)
Any thoughts on integrating with other accounting software in the future, like Xero?
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!