Toggl platform keeps track of the time you spend on projects

Toggl's time tracker and timesheet creating software is best suited for freelancers or small businesses.

There’s a few different problems that Toggl was created to solve. The first is that it can be hard, for freelancers who get paid hourly, to figure out exactly how much time has been dedicated to a particular project.

At its most basic, the platform – which comes as a website you sign into from a desktop computer, a browser extension and also a mobile app – allows you to start a timer running as you open up a particular piece of work, then assign a client and a task to that chunk of time.

The service then automatically creates detailed invoices and compiles this data into reports you can click on to figure out how long a project took, what proportion of your week was dedicated to a particular client and how your workflow varies from day to day.

It’s simple and effective, although the addition of a few other features might make the process more seamless. For example, the app doesn’t detect idle time like some other time trackers. You could have gone for a coffee break or be staring into space for 10 minutes: if you forgot to pause the timer, it will all go into the report as productive time .

With the free basic version of the app, you can track the working hours of up to five people working together in a team – making it ideal software for a small business. This is where Toggl is useful in a couple of other ways: first, team leaders can keep an eye on the progress of the group, and secondly you’ll build up a database of how many hours it took to complete projects. This makes creating estimates more straightforward next time: it can be easy to underestimate how long projects take, especially when dealing with demanding clients.

Toggl can be a real boost to efficiency, helping teams to quantify what they’re already doing and figure out where their efforts are best concentrated. But it’s not designed to transform how productive they are or to really reorganise their workflow.

For those juggling multiple jobs at once or having problems focusing and prioritising, it’s best used in tandem with other productivity apps and task-management software.

q&a seamless productivity

Jessica Holland expands on the uses of Toggl:

How does the mobile version work?

Much like the desktop platform, it allows you to track working hours while you’re out and about. It works even when you’re offline and synchs back to the cloud once you’re connected again. However, some iPhone users have reporting syncing problems.

Is the software compatible with my devices?

It works on iPhone, Android, Windows devices, Mac OS X and Linux, and there’s a Chrome extension. It also integrates with other productivity software, including Salesforce, Freshbooks, GitHub, Asana, Trello and Basecamp.

How about the Pro upgrade?

For $9-$10 a month (depending on whether you pay monthly or annually), the Pro plan allows you to mark certain hours as “billable”, and assign a monetary value. It will allow you to add an unlimited number of team members, create tasks within projects and export reports to Excel so you can so complicated number-crunching.

How about the Business plan?

Among the features of the plan (which costs $49 to $59 monthly) are automated tracking reminders, time audits (these help you find entries that have been mislabelled), a dashboard to get a sense of what’s going on, and automatic emails with reports at key stages of a project. There’s also an intermediate “Pro Plus” plan ($18 to $20 monthly) which allows you to attach one Business feature to a regular Pro plan.

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