todo.vu vs TrackingTime

TrackingTime has been around for a few years now. They have recently updated their user interface and have a reasonably competitive pricing model.

This product looks pretty good at first glance, but once you start to dig a bit deeper, you may find some deficiencies in its underlying architecture.

todo.vu vs TrackingTime features

todo.vu’s benefits over TrackingTime

You can track multiple users’ time on a single task

It may not be apparent when you first try TrackingTime that you can’t track multiple users’ time on a single task, particularly if you are a single user. But if you work in a team, it will quickly become a problem, as you’ll likely need to add time from multiple staff on the one task.

For example, managers can spend 10 or more minutes just creating a task for one of their staff, and then like to follow up after the team member has completed the task. This is all time that should be logged to one task — both from the manager and then from the staff member.

With todo.vu, it is easy for multiple users to track time to the same task. But in TrackingTime, this is not possible; you would need to create another task called “creating other task”, or just not bother tracking your admin time.

The other implication in TrackingTime is that you can’t re-assign a task once it has time entries on it. If you have a task that needs input from multiple people, you need to create multiple tasks. This can cause fragmentation of information and make reporting messy.

todo.vu integrates time tracking with tasks

TrackingTime is time tracking only, with little task management capabilities.

For example, tasks in TrackingTime can’t hold attachments, they have a very simplistic workflow (to do or done), and, as mentioned above, you can’t track multiple staff time on a task, so you must create multiple tasks.

In todo.vu, your every task – whether a sales lead, your tax return, a bug fix, or a phone call you need to return – is organised in a simple, but powerful, Kanban-style layout, which you can customise to suit any workflow.

You can drag n’ drop tasks, assign new team members to tasks, invite clients to log in to view tasks, leave comments on tasks, upload files to tasks, and even create tasks from your email inbox.

Plus, every task in todo.vu will keep a detailed record of file attachments, activity and conversations — even email conversations!

todo.vu provides a bird’s-eye view of everyone’s tasks

In TrackingTime, you aren’t able to view tasks assigned to another User. You can view your tasks, and you can view tasks within a single project, but if you want to know what one of your colleagues has on their list, there is no way to do so.

In todo.vu, Users can see all tasks for any User, unless that User has marked a task as private. You can even see as staff track their time to tasks in real time; you can see who’s working on what, when.

You can track billed time in todo.vu

Although you can create many reports in TrackingTime, there is no practical way to know if time has been billed or not in your reports.

The only way to know if time has been billed is to create a label and tag time entries when you bill them.  While you can tell which times have been billed, you have no way of knowing when they were billed or on which bill they were charged.

If a client enquires about the details of a bill, you will have great difficulty tracking down the specific entries for that bill or even tracking them back to the original task request.

todo.vu can track billed time right from the original task request through to the final bill. todo.vu generates billing reports that can be adjusted in detail to reveal as much or as little as you wish to the client.

If there are any queries about a bill, you can easily track each time entry back to the User, date, and original task.