Ask HN: What timesheet / staff schedule tools do you use?

2 points by bohinjc 9 years ago | 3 comments

We are looking for an easy-to use, extensive, staff schedule and timesheet solution.

We are a software consulting company with about 80 devs, and every single tool I find seems either over-complicated and restrictive, or too simple to handle projects. Speaking with different size company, I couldn't find anybody happy with their actual solution.

It can be a SaaS solution or an open-source tool. API for import / export are a need (so we can feed invoicing for example).

So, what do you use and what are the pro / cons ?

tixocloud 9 years ago |

We were also frustrated with our solutions and ended up using Excel with Python automations. Not ideal but Excel was the most flexible for us. We're thinking of building out a solution when we have time.

Pros - easy, flexible and simple and it allowed us to build our own programming logic that helps us size our proposals

Cons - risk of errors, file size could get large, non-collaborative

What are you guys using? Were there features you're looking at? What tools have you looked at?

bohinjc 9 years ago | |

We currently use a mix of a home-made redmine extension for scheduling, redmine tickets for time logging and google sheet with custom addon for compiling everything per project / period for easier birds eye and invoicing.

We do not plan on maintaining redmine extension, we have different tickets trackers for specific projets, and it is very limited / simple (when not clunky at times).

It worked well for last years and volume, but it tends to be too limited, and not suitable for bigger needs (requires too much hand work each week to cleanup data and handle exceptions).

Main features we look for are : * simple staff planning/schedule (resource requirement, capacity, allocation) * time logging with aggregation per activity per project and basic analytics. Custom rules like increments (1/2 hour, hour, ...), minimum logging per day, ... * full API access to plug to ticket trackers (time logging), invoicing, ...

We looked at some ERP but they usually were to clunky or complicated, and dedicated tools always seems too simple (most don't have any staff schedule management for example).

tixocloud 9 years ago | | |

Forgot to mention that we've also JIRA as well more so for tracking progress but we've never used it for invoicing. Have you checked them out?