Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

http://www.tiempoapp.com/invoices

by tadmilbourn • 12 years ago

116 80 12 years ago

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

We’re taking a slightly different approach to invoicing for billable hours. From talking with freelancers, independent contractors, agencies, and other professional services companies, we found that there’s a significant delay between when work is done and when the invoice actually goes out. Then, there’s even more delay between when that invoice goes out and when it gets paid.

We’re trying to reduce both of those delays as much as possible.

By sending a notification once hours have been approved, we remove the delay between when the work is done and when someone “runs invoicing.”

By making the notification personable and easily viewed on mobile devices, we increase the speed with which the customers pay.

That’s the general concept! I’d love to hear any feedback and comments the HN community has!

davedx2• 12 years ago

In my experience as a contractor, the payment period is usually in the contract. The terms I've seen the most are 30 days and my current contract is 35 days.

No amount of reducing friction will reduce that payment period. I know of one contractor who negotiated a higher rate by increasing the period. Companies typically run long invoice cycles, and you don't stand a chance of changing that to anything shorter usually.

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

That's a fair point. It's going to be tough to change those types of companies because they tend to have people that manage and optimize cash flow (i.e. pay bills on the last day possible without incurring penalties).

From our experience with small businesses Intuit (the Tiempo team is all former Intuit employees), we know there's a large swath of companies that aren't as complicated or as rigorous. For those companies, just getting the bill taken care of and out of the way is a benefit. Those are the companies we'll focus on first.

Pistos22• 12 years ago

The first thing that comes to mind is: While the time-spent entries I enter are usually exactly what ends up on invoices, on occasion, this is not the case. An entry might get edited (text description of work done, or even amount of time spent), or deleted, prior to generating the invoice and sending it. The concern here is that if clients are notified "too quickly" about time spent, updates would cause confusion, or there might have arisen certain expectations from the client that would end up not being met.

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

That's one of the top concerns I have as well. But, as you point out, the majority of the time that's not the case. So far, we've found that the notifications provide better transparency than the more common "here's all the work I did over the last month." I recently had a case with our accountant where I received a bill 3 weeks after the work was done and I totally didn't remember it. I emailed her and then we got on the phone to talk about it. All of that is wasted time (and money).

yzap• 12 years ago

The design looks top notch and beyond that, it looks like you've really identified a specific part of the time tracking/invoicing workflow that has not yet been solved well and you have come up with a solution that completely nails that pain point.

Great work guys! : )

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

Thanks! We appreciate it.

cheez3• 12 years ago

Do you guys have any kind of API?

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

Our API is not publicly available yet. Do you have any thoughts on what you'd want to use it for?

cheez3• 12 years ago

When I use Toggl's API, I use it for creating time entries and getting project info. If your app is RESTful, then you wouldn't need to do anything further.

yarri• 12 years ago

Integration with accounting software, like Wave[0]

[0] http://docs.waveapps.io/index.html

dougcorrea• 12 years ago

API will be really great to integrates with Desktop apps. The app is very clean and usefull, well done!

pc863• 12 years ago

I see in one of the screenshots there is a 3.9% fee - is that your fee as well as credit card processing?

kkilat• 12 years ago

Yep, that's Stripe's 2.9% credit card processing fee, and then 1% that we take.

Our goal in the future is to open up and accept other online payment options that have lower overall fees, as well though. We definitely want you to keep as much of the money you've earned as possible, and get it as fast as possible!

tghw• 12 years ago

This service is worth 1% of my income? On top of 2.9% fees? For some reason, I have trouble believing that it'd be worth my while.

bnejad• 12 years ago

You may want to make that clear somewhere on your website. I don't want to click "Try Now" before I can see the terms/pricing/etc

pc863• 12 years ago

Anything that supports ACH would be good for payments to agencies or consultancies which can often be $15-20k or more. I know Dwolla is one but I'm sure there are others.

It would also be nice to have the option to add the fee to the invoice rather than pay it out of gross. Meaning for a $100 invoice, add $3.90 to it so that I get $100 after all fees. Most clients would never go for that but on smaller invoices you can often charge reasonable processing fees.

Certainly wouldn't work for $400+ in fees, though :)

Pvt_Hudson2• 12 years ago

Is this available outside of the United States?

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

The time tracking aspect works anywhere (there are apps for iOS and Android as well). For invoicing, to accept payment, we're currently set up to work with US Bank Accounts. Your customers can pay you as long as they have a credit card.

Over time, we want to be as globally available as possible. That means more countries and more methods to pay.

Pvt_Hudson2• 12 years ago

Thanks! This looks promising.

tijs3• 12 years ago

Is it normal in the US to pay supplier invoices through credit card payments? Nobody would pay 3,9% on amounts of more than a few hundred dollars right? A normal project invoice for say a web studio would usually be well over 10k which means you're regularly paying more than $400 to get a single invoice processed? Am i missing something or do people actually do this? Not trying to be snarky, truly curious.

davedx2• 12 years ago

In my limited experience, it's not usual. My US clients have paid with Paypal, bank transfer and check.

tijs3• 12 years ago

Let's just say that compared to 0$ for a bank transfer (at least where i'm from) it seems like a bad deal.

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

Those are all payment methods we plan to support in the future. Bank Transfer and Check don't have the same kind of processing costs, so that will allow us to do the payments for something more like 1% instead of 3.9%. We also hope to make the process of setting up and verifying those accounts less of a pain.

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

Great points. We've actually talked to folks whose total fees were about 6% after all was said and done. It's crazy, but it does happen.

In your example, what I'd ask is if the web studio would be willing to pay $400 to get that $10k weeks earlier than they otherwise would have. That might be a good cash flow outcome for them.

All that being said, you're exactly right, the fee structure makes transactions of a certain size not make sense if you're doing more regular invoicing. That's why we want to add more payment methods over time that are lower cost.

tijs3• 12 years ago

Sure, earlier payment might very well make it wortwhile. Maybe, if you have validated numbers, that should be part of the pitch on the invoices page? (x% of our customers get paid in x weeks)

notahacker• 12 years ago

If they're willing to pay $400 to get that $10k in they really ought to be bothered to spend 5 man minutes creating an invoice the old fashioned way, and maybe another 5 man minutes chasing the payment if it's not made on schedule.

bronson4• 12 years ago

I tried your service until I discovered you want 4% per invoice. That's 4% of my income. For comparison, California taxes (effective) were 5.8% of my income.

Please mention this up front!

When you add a calendar overview and a more sane pay structure, I'm happy to look again. Thanks.

sanityinc• 12 years ago

Not only that, but the payment might end up being charged back up to 180 days (or even longer) later.

jprince• 12 years ago

Currently, I use On The Job, which works really well at invoicing and time tracking. What I do is I PDF the invoice and email it to clients, and have them pay me via Square Cash. As long as I don't do more than 2500$ of work for any particular client in a given week, they can easily use that.

It costs them nothing and it costs me nothing to do this, and there is no percentages taken. Also, we both understand when payment is due, and normally the client pays on the due date. If they don't pay on the due date no amount of pretty software is going to make them more likely to, for obvious reasons. How do you plan to get me to give away 3.9% of my income to use a more integrated service?

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

Jprince, that's a nice setup. You've manually put together many of the core components Tiempo offers. It sounds like you're getting paid quickly, at low cost, and its a good experience for both you and your customers.

In fact, what you could do is use Tiempo for your time tracking and use the result to create your PDF invoice and continue with your Square Cash payment process. Compared to On the Job, Tiempo's time tracking is free and available on mobile devices. So you wouldn't have to be attached to your computer to track time.

But, what Tiempo Instant Invoices does is allow folks that aren't as technical to get all of that benefit that you've already wired together in one place. And, as I've said elsewhere in the comments, we'll add more payment options (that are lower cost) in the future.

diminoten• 12 years ago

Hackers like us forget how hard some of this stuff is to put together, and time consuming.

Once you've invested time into your homegrown system, your product inertia grows a great deal. "Why do x when you could just do y,z,a,b,c together?" should be a red flag to folks like us that we're not really suggesting something easier for other people, even if it's easier for us.

tomasien• 12 years ago

If you guys are interested in getting these costs down, my company KnoxPayments.com could help. Without credit card fees, it's easier to charge way less and still have a solid system.

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

Cool! Let's chat. I'll reach out to you.

jetro223• 12 years ago

I also run a time tracking service (http://www.spiketime.net <- sorry, I had to ;-)) and just tried Tiempo.

I really like the idea of instant invoices and the approval process (just the fee is a little bit high, I think).

Some random thoughts: - What's the difference between an employee and contractor - is it just the label or do they have different rights in your app?

- When you start the mobile app for the first time without using the website before you don't know the meaning of the icons for draft, submitted and approved (I thought the icon for approved was the save-button).

- When using the timer I can't select a customer/service when the timer runs as you do this when you click stop timer. Also it isn't possible to make any notes on a running timer

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! And there's no shame in that plug.

Employee and Contractor don't have much difference within Tiempo in terms of rights. But, they have profound differences with how they're treated once you integrate with accounting software like QuickBooks Online.

We plan to get rid of the "Draft" status as it's underused and will allow us to simplify the design further (just Submitted and Approved status).

The timer not allowing for details until it's stopped is something we'll address shortly.

pw• 12 years ago

This looks like a fine product and kudos to its creators, but I hate that products like this encourage bad practices for freelancers/consultants. Basically, if you're charging in way that requires software to track how much clients owe you, you're doing it wrong. Take the advice of tptacek and patio11 and charge by the day or the week, not the hour.

alpeb• 12 years ago

Got any links to that advice? In my experience I prefer hourly billing, mostly because of the kind of clients I handle.

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

Control-F for "Charging Weekly: It Makes Everything Automatically Better"

eswat3• 12 years ago

Here’s one from patio11: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

And if you don’t mind spending some change, I found the Double Your Freelancing Rate book to be a good read that really got me psyched about getting away from an hourly rate (so in my case it was definitely worth it): http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com

vellum• 12 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101802

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101355

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714930

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420203

eswat3• 12 years ago

Yeah, which is a shame for good apps like FreshBooks and probably Tiempo that handle the other heavy lifting like invoicing but don’t play nice with a day/week workflow.

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

What are the differences that you see between a day/week workflow and an hourly one?

bdunn• 12 years ago

It actually really shocks me that a lot of invoicing tools that support time tracking still only allow for $rate * $hours invoice creation. I invoice weekly, and end up needing to piece together invoices by hand.

(I run a product, Planscope, which supports daily/weekly billing for budget tracking, but we don't have invoicing... yet.)

bronson4• 12 years ago

It sounds like you live in an ideal world. I often help different clients in the same day. Website bugfix in the morning, bring up bluetooth in the afternoon. It's hard to say ahead of time how long either task will take.

Am I supposed to look over my commits at the end of the week and guess a weekly amount for each client? That sounds awful for everybody.

Sometimes you can bill weekly, sometimes you need more granularity. (I use hours.)

And, no, I'm not doing it wrong.

stanmancan• 12 years ago

I believe part of the idea is not to take on jobs that are an hour here or there, but to take on work that requires full days or weeks. Your daily/weekly wouldn't change from customer to customer.

prawn• 12 years ago

Doing it wrong or just doing things a different way? There are thousands and thousands of businesses out there with web site needs that just don't justify day or week rates for their maintenance partners.

I might work on 8+ different projects in any given day and receive emails/calls from 20+ clients about tasks needing to be done. It can be brutal but I don't know that it's "doing it wrong".

Over time, I could transition to clients that mean I might bill daily/weekly but none of them would be my current clients and these current clients would still need someone to provide that service at a level with finer granularity.

welder• 12 years ago

I like https://wakatime.com because it does the time tracking for me automatically so I don't have to use a timer app.

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

That's the ideal! The problem with time tracking is that the hours don't get captured in the first place. Automatic tracking greatly increases the likelihood that the time is captured. We'll do more to automate in the future. Our current focus on that front is integration with accounting systems as those tend to be a costly part of the process to the business (either time lost or money spent paying a bookkeeper).

fenguin• 12 years ago

Huge fan of Wakatime here as well -- I usually work on more than one project simultaneously and it helps greatly that Wakatime tells me exactly how I've split my time between each repo.

Pistos22• 12 years ago

I read that page top to bottom, and was not motivated to switch from my current provider (Freshbooks), with which I am quite satisfied. I consider slowness of payment due to my clients, not my time tracking / invoicing tool.

ebahnx• 12 years ago

I'm really excited to see Tiempo make waves. Time tracking has been a major pain that hasn't been adequately solved for a long time, so it's good to see some innovation here.

Any thoughts on integrating with other accounting software in the future, like Xero?

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

Yes! We have an integration with QuickBooks Online already. Xero and ZenPayroll are next on our list. Another commenter mentioned Wave, so maybe we'll get to them before long.

thenduks2• 12 years ago

Looks very nice. I've been using timelyapp.com and this seems to cover my use-case similarly but free - yay!

A couple points of feedback:

- As a person who lives anywhere but the US, the date format is all wrong and will constantly be a source of annoyance. The datepicker helps, but the csv outputs dates like 07/08/14... I have no idea what date that is. How about ISO standards? 2014/07/08 is completely unambiguous to everyone.

- I often do a whole day of work. Say like 4+ hours for a single client. I write a lot of notes during that time for my own reference. So I really need to be able to: type notes while the timer is going, and also for the notes to respect my line breaks (otherwise it just comes out jibberish if I try to write bullet points/etc).

- I guess I will use the submitted->approved flow for pending->billed. Not sure if this is something you intend... I 'approve' my own hours, but I would like to be able to mark hours as having been billed so I don't accidentally do it twice :)

- The little bubble next to my entries says 'RF', I assume that's a place for an avatar. Am I blind and missing how to set one?

But yea overall it looks great!

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

Thanks! On your feedback:

- I apologize for our overly American design :-). We're based out of California, so we tend to build from that point of view first. Dates, Timezones, Language and Currencies are all things we'll have to deal with. Your CSV recommendation is easy enough to make in the meantime. Thanks for pointing it out!

- The timer will soon open while its running. It's a more complicated situation on mobile where taking notes after actually makes sense.

- There will be a "billed" status shortly to ensure that doesn't happen (we track that but haven't made it apparent in the user interface).

- Those bubbles are just begging to be filled! Another "coming shortly" feature. Having the person's face is actually an important factor in creating invoices that are more likely to be paid quickly.

JoshTriplett• 12 years ago

How about ISO standards? 2014/07/08 is completely unambiguous to everyone.

Agreed; however, ISO 8601 is actually YYYY-MM-DD, not YYYY/MM/DD. So, 2014-07-08.

thenduks2• 12 years ago

Ha good catch! Honestly slashes or dashes would be fine with me though :)

akadruid1• 12 years ago

Name is too similar to Tempo (tempoplugin.com)

ultimatedelman• 12 years ago

anyone else getting scrollbars distorting the page size when hovering over the "advance" arrow on the right side?

member345• 12 years ago

yes, on Chromium/Xubuntu

nathan_f77• 12 years ago

Look forward to seeing your ZenPayroll integration!

tadmilbourn22• 12 years ago

Awesome! Make sure to click the "I want this!" button on the Settings page in Tiempo. Then you'll be on our contact list as we further flesh out the integration.

vesh• 12 years ago

I currently use Harvest for time tracking, creating invoices and sending it out. It would be nice to see a list of features and costs without signing up. It looks like time tracking, approval is free to use. Connecting to Quickbooks costs 10$/month. To create and send invoices you have to choose to receive payments through Tiempo, which will cost 3.9% of the invoice amount. Customers get an option to pay by credit card.

I can see this simplifies the process for a lot of people. Being able to send invoices without using the payment service is personally a deal breaker as it would be way higher than the 19$ I currently pay.

Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid

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