Time Doctor Review

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Date Established

2012

Pros

• Advanced features
• Simple pricing plan
• Easy to use

Cons

• Not suitable for small businesses
• Limited mobile apps

Overview

Brought to you by a team of 20 individuals in eight countries, Time Doctor currently serves over twenty thousand subscribers around the world. Despite the obvious Doctor Who reference, this Time Doctor is a time-tracking and productivity app. More than just a digital timesheet, Time Doctor aims to not only track your time but help you learn to use it more effectively. And, ya know, protect the space/time continuum.

With the ability to assign time to individual tasks, payroll features, and other productivity aids, Time Doctor is a well-received, well-priced solution for your time tracking needs. While perfectly suited for those of you who work from home, Time Doctor is also an excellent solution for small business owners looking for a way to increase their efficiency. Moreover, Time Doctor appears to scale well into larger businesses as well; The Home Depot, Allstate, Keller Williams Realty, and Apple (yes, that Apple) all use Time Doctor.

Web-Based Or On-Premise

Time Doctor is a program that you download from the internet. When I installed my trial, it took about 19 megabytes of hard drive space. Additionally, you will likely interface with the Time Doctor website to see your dashboard and time sheet.

Pricing

Time Doctor has one of the easiest pricing plans I have ever come across. No tiered pricing, no features locked behind a paywall, just one price: $9.99 per user per month. At this price, all users gain access to all features of the software. There is also a discount if you have more than 10 users (for more information, contact Time Doctor). On the other hand, if there is only one person at your company needing access to your time tracker, Time Doctor offers a $5 version of their software with a single login. There is also a free version, but that comes with a severely limited list of features.

If you want to give it a try before buying, you can sign up for the 30-day free trial, no credit card information required.

Ease Of Use

Personally, I found Time Doctor very easy to use. I do software tests all the time, so I might have an easier time understanding how these things work, but despite that experience, my impression is that this software is pretty intuitive.

Once you have an account and have downloaded and installed the program, you are led through a quick tutorial on how to track your time, take breaks, and add tasks. This is a seamless process and feels pretty natural. Once you know how to do these three things, you know how to do just about everything the downloaded program is designed for. To add extra hours, view reports or screenshots, or alter any of your account details, you will need to log in to Time Doctor’s web app.

The web app has significantly better design than the downloaded program but is a bit more complicated. Fortunately, while less easy to learn than the downloaded app, it is still pretty straightforward. Your landing page is your Dashboard, and from there you can edit your time sheet, view screenshots, see reports, and more. It is well laid out and intuitive.

Customer Service & Support

In terms of customer service, Time Doctor has a few options. First, there is the “Knowledge Base,” which is the industry standard term for a collection of articles explaining different facets of a particular software. Time Doctor’s knowledge base has over 100 articles in it and describes pretty much every part of the program. Part of this Knowledge Base is a list of 10 tutorial videos that go a long way toward explaining how Time Doctor works.

Additionally, you can send in an email ticket for support from the knowledge base home page. This is probably the best thing to do if you have a particular question that is beyond basic use of Time Doctor.

Finally, Time Doctor runs a blog that contains some product updates, so it is worth keeping an eye on. The blog is chock-full of productivity tips and information, so if you are looking for that sort of thing, you may find it doubly useful.

Negative Reviews & Complaints

Time Doctor is a well-reviewed program, with only a few minor complaints on the record. Here they are for your consideration:

• Payroll Complaints: I found one user wishing that the payroll system in Time Doctor was automated. It seems that Time Doctor calculates the appropriate wages for employees and can even process the payments, but does not do this automatically.
• Not For Freelancers: I ran across one user who commented that if all you want is software to track your time for a future invoice, this is probably not the best solution for you. Time Doctor is designed more for business owners who want to use it for payroll or for accounting.

Positive Reviews & Testimonials

As I mentioned, most Time Doctor subscribers are happy with the product. Here are a few excerpts from the comments of satisfied customers:

We use Time Doctor to track everything. It’s helpful to track billable time. We also use it to monitor education and training hours. The problems Time Doctor solves are quite extensive: it shows exactly how much time a project takes. So if we underestimate, now we know better. Second, it shows where time is fragmented or lost (via screen captures) so that helps us realize where we can be both more efficient and more effective.

I use Time Doctor only for myself to check how my week productivity is. I can check how many hours a day I am really working and what kind of tasks consume more than others in order to do some optimizations.

Time Doctor has been a lifesaver for me. I am a one-person design company and I need to track the time I spend on many different projects all at once. My previous solution was to write down the time on sticky notes or notepads, but there was always the chance that I might misplace it or lose it. Nor could I generate my invoices from my home office if I’d left the billing hours info at my office. So this was a great all in one solution. Now I can choose the task I’m working on and don’t have to worry about writing things down.

Time Doctor has been used to track time on email, time working on projects for my fitness and lifestyle coaching work, to apply for projects and professional roles and other tasks. Time Doctor provides me with a lot of feedback and awareness on where I’m focusing my time and energy. I use it as an individual.

Features

Here are some of the features for which Time Doctor is known:

• Time Tracking: Keep track of not just your total time spent working, but how many hours you spent on each job. If you need a break, no problem: press the break button and take what time you need. Additionally, if you need to edit your time after the fact, or if you forget to start the timer, you can add hours here.

• Screen Monitoring: If enabled, this feature captures images of your screen and sends them off to your supervisor to help ensure every moment is productive. Feel like this is an invasion of privacy? You are not alone. That said, this feature is designed to allow you to delete screen captures you don’t like. However, the time slot for that image will also be deducted from your pay.
• Activity Monitoring: In addition to screen monitoring, Time Doctor keeps track of the websites you visit while on the clock. During my test, it did a pretty good job keeping track of my activity, but I was able to break it by running videos in the background of a separate web browsing window. Impressively, the screenshot feature did capture the episode of American Ninja Warrior I put on to test the monitoring functions of Time Doctor.

• Payroll: Depending on how you choose to pay your employees, you’ll experience Time Doctor’s Payroll services differently. If you use Paypal’s MassPay function, or something similar, you can set-and-forget your payroll to run automatically. If not, you may need to manually process payroll each month. There is also a system for adding bonuses should the situation warrant it, which I thought was interesting.

• Reports: There are a number of reports available for your consideration, including those that analyze employee timesheets, timelines, projects, and poor time use. That last one is interesting to me; it tracks employees and analyzes their “personal computer use.” If they spend more than 10 minutes on non-work related sites, they could be in trouble.
• Productivity Hints: If you wander on the internet (who doesn’t?) and get a little too far off the beaten path to be considered productive anymore, Time Doctor will send you a pop-up asking if you are still working on your given task. Additionally, you get a little time bar at the bottom of your screen to help keep you focused on the job at hand (pictured below).

Integrations & Add-Ons

Time Doctor integrates with 32 apps and services including:

• Asana (Read our review)
• Basecamp 3 (Read our review)
• GitHub
• Google Apps
• Jira
• Mavenlink (Read our review)
• Microsoft Projects
• Quickbooks (Read our review)
• Salesforce (Read our review)

Security

Time Doctor uses SSL encryption for all communications with their servers. Those servers are housed in an “enterprise datacenter facilities with 24/7 monitoring and hosting support, so you can rest assured that your data is safe.”

Final Verdict

Do I like Time Doctor? To answer that, let’s review what comes with every subscription: you get a time tracker that breaks down your time sheet into separate tasks; you get a productivity monitor to help ensure you are being as efficient as possible while working (Time Doctor’s website claims an increase in efficiency of up to 22%); you get a service to integrate with your payroll system and potentially automate payday in entirety; and you get it all for less than ten bucks a month.

While I do feel the whole screenshot/activity monitoring is a little creepy, especially when installed on a non-work device, I also know that you can turn this function off when the time for work has ended (important if you work remotely using your own device). Overall, the combination of usability, good features, and value-for-money makes Time Doctor worth your attention. But don’t take my word for it! Go sign up for the free trial and decide for yourself.