Time Tracker Lite for Mobile Phones

A good fit for the typical iPhone-owning demographic, Time Tracker (Lite) aims to log time against different projects and activities. Once set up, starting or stopping an activity is as easy as tapping the appropriate customer slot on the screen, with other activities being automatically managed (i.e. you can't be doing two things at once). It's a system that's worked superbly well on other handheld platforms in the past and which works well here too.

With everything 'empty' at first, Time Tracker is somewhat daunting, but you soon get the hang of it. Most importantly, you don't have to input customer name AND project name AND Task name - any or all of these can be left blank, for maximum convenience. So, for example, one time slot could simply be 'Painting the shed', for your own personal time allocation interest, while another might be 'Reformatting disks', as part of project 'Rebuilding IT infrastructure' for customer 'VFS Ltd'. As simple or as complex as you like.

Time Tracker approaches this modular system in exactly the right way, in that the names of customers, projects and tasks are each held in the database separately and, like any database, you can filter data by any criteria. It also means that, once entered, you never have to input the same text again. So, for example, having completed a job for 'VFS Ltd', you can simply select their name from a pick list when you set up a slot for the next job they give you. All very flexible, and tapping on 'History' lets you display timed activities sorted by date, customer, project, etc. There's no way to export this data to another computer, sadly, the main reason why this isn't a 5 star application.

Another small reason is that the times shown on the main screen aren't dynamic, i.e. the clock on the current active task doesn't auto-refresh. This is a shame and a bit misleading, although thankfully the clock IS running in the background and intelligently keeps track of absolute time so that you can switch to another application, start up Time Tracker again later and the timer that's running will be automatically updated.

There's a Lite version for trying out, while the paid version (only a handful of dollars) entitles you to support and some enhancements. Time Tracker is highly recommended for any professionals who need to account for their time. It's not perfect, but it's fully functional and will pay for itself many times over.