Running a small business can be daunting when it comes to keeping records and the paperwork, especially for small businesses and freelancers. The administrative side of a business may require more workforce, and that means more expenses.

OfficeTime is a Program which helps a business owner reduce on paperwork, thus saving on costs. It is simple to use, and the price is not prohibitive. It is also very practical and does most of the heavy lifting for you. As the business owner, when it comes to calculating how much time you may have spent on a particular project and the billing costs to your customers, Officetime has you covered. All you need to do as the business owner is print and send the bill.

OfficeTime set up

I have worked with several programs that take ages to install. There is nothing that discourages me more than setting up a program for a longer period of time than it would actually take me to do the program’s task manually.

The set up for this invoicing program is not time-consuming at all. In fact OfficeTime is a do-it-yourself program. Before you can even use the app, you need to lay down the basics by creating your job categories and the billing rates.

OfficeTime can be programmed to produce up to the minute billing. Once that is done, you can now give a specific project a name and link it to the customer you will be doing working for, all while including the hourly rate at which you work with. From this point, you can go ahead and choose a default category and then start timing your project. For Apple users, you have the option to sync your timed sessions to Apple’s calendar app.

Features

OfficeTime has a start and stop button which one presses at the beginning of a project and the end. This automatically records the time spent on that particular project. Another lovely feature of this program is that you cannot bill two clients simultaneously for the work that you have done. Once a new recording begins any other recording that may have been going on stops automatically and is stored. So, billing a client accidentally is next to impossible. The setting of this option appears on the pop-up menu when installing the program.

In the case of errors, everything on OfficeTime from the date, billing, time costs and even notes can be adjusted manually – now that is flexibility right there. The billing system also has fascinating features; for example, you can change the line view to a graph view and with a touch of a button, generate an invoice with its own unique number. OfficeTime also has a feature that prevents you from repeating the same task twice. Essentially, it can identify an entry that has been stored twice.

If you need to export reports, that should not be a problem, as the program can spit out plain text files.  The only setback here is that it does not work with Excel file formatted spreadsheets, although you can still import data.

My Final take

After installing OfficeTime in my small business, the paperwork reduced quite significantly and so did the workload. The time and money that I have spent in the past, especially on invoicing, is now better spent evaluating and growing my business. I have already recouped my costs as OfficeTime is a one- time buy off.

My only set back with this program is that the graphs look a little “old-school”. But I quickly over looked this because of how effective the program is. My all in all recommendation is that this program is entirely worth it.