Chrometa Time Tracker

Chrometa Time Tracker
888-340-6425
www.chrometa.com

From the August 2010 Review of Time & Billing Systems.

While we are on the subject of capturing time for billing, have you ever wondered how you spend your time on the computer? Enter Chrometa, a utility that does just one thing: It tracks the time you spend on an active window and captures the window title for every window and/or application you open on your computer. Just install and launch, and it begins to build a database that shows three items: category, window name and elapsed time. The user may pause time collection for off-work time, and Chrometa will begin logging time as idle after a configurable number of minutes.

When you return, you are prompted with a window asking if you were in a meeting, out of the office, on the phone, etc. Time data can be viewed for any available period and filtered to exclude smaller increments. The entire process is automated.

This provides a useful record of websites visited, documents edited, projects worked on and idle time. The user can create and assign categories on the fly to these entries, but not assign rates or generate invoices. The data may be exported into Excel for further use and analysis. This product may be of special interest to web workers, researchers and writers, to capture how much time was spent editing a document versus surfing Facebook.

Anyone who needs to get started tracking their time might find this a no-brainer way to get an objective look at their work habits. For those who just will not record time concurrently, this is a tool to begin some kind of data collection. The product doesn’t currently integrate with any time and billing system for direct entry or transfer of the recorded time into such programs, but it can be useful tool for capturing your everyday tasks to help ensure you’ve accurately recorded all billable time.

There is no user login, so the data will be collected for whatever user is working on the PC. Chrometa is priced at $99, with a 30-day trial period and can be downloaded at Chrometa.com. The product was recently featured on The CPA Technology Advisor’s CPATechViews.com blog; you can read more about the product here: www.CPATA.com/chrometa.