As business owners, freelancers, service providers, or just anyone that gets paid for the work services or products they provide time tracking and invoicing can be a pain. Keeping your business organized and making sure that you are being paid for the time you spend on projects is vital to any small or mid-sized business. Well, it’s vitally important to large corporations, but at that time you most likely have huge firms to manage all of your accounting. This article is aimed at those that are looking for inexpensive ways to track time and invoice their clients. If your also looking for a way to manage projects, be sure to check out our 10+ Top Project Management and Collaboration Applications.

We have collected 7 of the best time tracking and web-based invoicing applications on the web. These applications go beyond just mere invoicing or time tracking and provide estimates, intergration with other top applications, task management and reporting. If you know of any to add just let us know with a comment below.

The Best Time Tracking and Online Invoice Applications

1. Harvest

Freelancers, small businesses, and professional teams from a variety of industries including designers, architects, lawyers, accountants, non-profits, and universities. Harvest is the perfect tool for individuals and teams who need to track, analyze, and bill for their time.

• Live Time Tracking via web, widget or iPhone application
• Timesheets
• Invoicing with PayPal integration
• Budgets
• Basecamp integration
• Online invoicing or pdf exporting

2. Intervals

Intervals is web-based project management software that marries time tracking and task management in a collaborative online space with powerful reporting.

• Live Time Tracking via web
• Timesheets
• Online Invoicing or pdf export
• Timesheets
• Budgets with actual vs estimate
• File Storage
• Exports to QuickBooks

3. CashBoard

Time tracking, expenses, invoicing, estimates, and online payments done your way. Cashboard does it all, and does it for free.

• Live Timer with widgets and iPhone application
• Online invoicing and pdf export
• PayPal integration
• Timesheets
• Expenses
• Basecamp integration
• Ability to Manage Projects
• Estimates and Quotes

4. Paymo

One of our favorites. Have you or your business ever “approximated” the amount of time allocated to projects when billing clients – yet you always seem to work for more hours than you are paid? Has a project ever gotten “out-of-hand” costing far more hours than you originally budgeted? You need Paymo!

• Live Time Tracking via web or widget
• Project Management
• Task Management
• Reporting
• Invoicing
• Timesheets
• Budget with Actual vs Estimate
• iPhone Application and Basecamp integration
• File Upload and document storage
• PayPal integration
• Data Backup

5. Freshbooks

Send, track and collect payments quickly. Great for teams, freelancers and service providers.

• Live Time Tracking with widget and iPhone Application
• Budgets with Actual vs Estimate
• Track Expenses
• Many integrations with other apps: Basecamp, Mailchimp, Salesforce
• Integration with Payment Gateways: PayPal, Authorize.net, Verisign
• Recurring Invoices with ability to send online, pdf export, or mail

Data Backup

6. Ronin

Send Invoices. Get Paid. Track time, invoices, payments, estimates, and clients. Simple online invoicing and time tracking. Perfect for small businesses and freelancers. Designed to make you look professional.

• Live Time Tracking via web or widget
• PayPal and Authorize.net integration
• Projects and User Profiles
• Estimates
• Customize invoices with html/css
• Contacts/Clients tracking
• Recurring invoices

7. LessAccounting

Your bookkeeping isn’t as hard as you think. You need to see who owes you money and bill them. Track all of your business expenses with LessAccounting, quickly and easily.

• Live Time Tracking with LessTimeSpent Widget
• Expenses and Invoicing with pdf export
• Reports
• Mileage Logs
• Bank Reconciliation and Bank Account integration
• Integration with popular apps: Highrise, Basecamp, PayPal, LessTimeSpent, iPhone, Wesabe, Billflo
• Proposals/Estimates
• QuickBooks importer

All of these time tracking and invoicing applications are incredible. We have had the experience to work with Paymo recently and it was a great project management tool as well as tracking employee time. If you are using something different let us know and we can add it to the list.

Comment Strategies

Comment Strategies

A recent article on Contentini.com titled “When Bad Comments Happen to Good Websites: Strategies for Managing Comments Online” talks about the different strategies that you can take to not only promote great discussions on your site, but to also make sure the noise (and spam) stays to a minimum.

Comments can be handled in one of two ways: either pre-publish or post-publish. The difference is whether you let the commenter publish their comment right away or that you moderate the comment first and then publish it. Both strategies work, it just depends on how much work you expect to do and what type of community of comments you would like to build. For example, with pre-publish comment strategies you will need to filter through all the comments for relevance and spam and hand select the comments that work for that post. On the other hand, you could let everything through and then go back and reduce the noise. The later, even though it requires less time, can really fill up a blog post with useless information and even reduce the number of good comments that you could get.

How can WordPress Help?

There are some great commenting plugin systems that WordPress uses to help reduce the noise and spam. The comment systems will capture most spam and spammy looking comments or can have people register, or use social network services such as Twitter and Facebook to comment. Let’s take alot at three popular 3rd Party Commenting systems with plugins for Wordpress.

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IntenseDebate

Automatic, the ones behind WordPress, acquired IntenseDebate, making it a real winner with WordPress. IntenseDebate allows for:

• Moderation: Auto-filter comments by keyword, email and IP addresses
• Blacklisting: Auto-delete comments by keyword, email and IP addresses, or ban users from posting
• Spam Filters: Akismet keeps the spam at bay
• Multiple Admins:Multiple Admins illustration Assign additional admins to manage the same blog/website

Commenting can also be done with services like Facebook, Twitter, and OpenID. Commentators can also sign up for an IntenseDebate profile or simply comment without one as a Guest.

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Disqus Comments

Disqus Comments lets your readers choose their identity, with Facebook Connect, OpenID, or Twitter Sign-in, when they leave a comment. They also:

• Allow your commenters to easily spread the discussion all across the social web, driving new traffic back to your site in the process. Every time someone leaves a comment, they can easily share the discussion happening on your site to friends and followers.
• Disqus has their own proprietary anti-spam that was built and trained to handle the junk some people try to pass off as comments.

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Echo

Echo is the next generation commenting system. It’s the way to share your content, and watch the live reaction. It is a newer player on the commenting block, but is back with features that they other two don’t have. We have not yet used Echo, but it does look promising.

• Echo has Real-time commenting: Watch people react to your content live – without refreshing the page!
• Hyper-Distributed: Visitors share your content with their friends across all their favorite social networks at once – broadening the conversation and driving new traffic.
• Multimedia: Echo items can include safe HTML, photos and video for a richer conversation.
• Strong Moderation: Echo supports countless modes and methods of moderation including ‘Pre Moderation’, ‘Post Moderation’, ‘New User Moderation’, blocking users, blocking IP addresses, bad word filtering, spam detection and more.

Each of these commenting systems have robust spam control to help weed out most of the noise that you would see on a blog. Plus, by having users register with an account, are allowing to use social networks such as Twitter or Facebook (or OpenID), the amount of unecessary and useless comments are weeded out automatically, letting you as the blog owner focus on helping to stimulate the conversation and building your community.

Do you receive too much email? Are you bogged down and frustrated by how much time it takes to handle these snippets of online communication? According to a recent global study conducted by IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) the resounding answer is YES! In fact, so much so that our drowning in email is actually causing us to be less productive.

According to the study, the biggest culprits, or sources of email overload are:

• News sources and professional subscriptions (61 %)
• Co-workers (39%)
• Professional networks (34%)
• Team/department sources (29%)
• Company wide corporate sources such as senior mgmt and HR (23%)

Source: http://www.urgentbusinessforms.com/employee_handbook.asp

Julie Freeman, President of IABC, stated that ,

…most people are struggling with how to manage it all and it’s having a significant impact on productivity around the world.An overwhelming majority (85 percent) said that it was having a negative impact at least some of the time. It was even higher (93 percent) for users of Blackberry devices and other personal digital assistants (PDAs).

So how can you stop spinning your wheels and get control? How about starting with yourself – stop sending so many emails! This can be done by considering the need to send… could you make a trek down the hall or pick up the phone instead? And what about the “reply all” and “cc” options? These options are hugely to blame for email overload and widely overused. Ensure that you aren’t misusing these options and train others to do the same.

Secondly, make a conscious decision regarding how much time you will devote to email daily – keep in mind that most people report spending about 40% of their time on email, which is considered lost productivity. Perhaps turning the volume down on your computer will help in avoiding the urge to review/answer every ping. Scheduling specific time for email is another possibility – “I will handle email 1 hour in the morning, 30 minutes after lunch, etc., etc.”

Thirdly, write better messages. Since people scan and don’t actually read anymore, make sure your subject line is strong, clear and descriptive. Then it’s important to be specific in your text. Yes, pleasantries are vitally important, but only to ensure that recipients aren’t offended or get wrong messages. Content should still be clean and simple. If you’re spending too much time writing and rewriting for context, then it’s probably smarter to call or meet in person.

Fourthly, ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE! This means creating a limited number of folders based on content and moving messages after reading them into appropriate folders. If the trash can is the appropriate folder, don’t be afraid to throw it away! De-cluttering your email life will not only prove beneficial to you as an individual, but should increase work productivity too.

Instead of approaching the typical customer complaint with anxiety and trepidation, why not try winning them over? Your return on investment just might convince you it’s worth your time.

We all know that bad news travels faster than good news, so how do we stop the negative feedback from reaching prospective clients and better yet, is it possible to resolve the original complaint fast enough to turn the complaint completely around?

TARP Worldwide is recognized as the world’s premier customer experience agency. John Goodmam cofounded TARP in 1971 and is still helping companies quantify and manage the customer experience in order to apply that knowledge to help clients realize bottom-line results.

So what happens when that knowledge identifies negative experiences? Let’s say one disappointed customer decides it won’t do any good to report the negative experience to the company, assuming it won’t do any good, so that person tells, on average, 6 others. Those other 6 become dissatisfied with you, without even giving you a single opportunity to prove otherwise and tell 9 others. We now have a probable 63 negative customer experiences.

According to TARP, there is an assumed level of influence of 25%. Only one quarter of those 64 (rounding up from 63 for cleaner number crunching) will act on what they hear. This means 16 people are likely to remember the poor customer service remarks and, voila~ Pandora’s box is wide open.

At this point, mouth wide open, we realize that saving one customer is more like saving 16! So let’s talk how to consistently handle negative customer experiences:

1. Identify issue at the EXACT point of negative experience
2. Encourage company contact to show true empathy
3. Empower company contact to DEFUSE the situation by openly discussing viable solutions
4. End with a thanking customer and passing along the experience/outcome/solution internally for analysis and permanent solution

Learning from past case studies can help companies avoid similar pitfalls and also provides excellent fodder for turning bad situations into good experiences. Take for instance Toyota and it’s recent massive recall issue.

Take a look at the following clips :

Toyota speaks directly to owners through an ad campaign that tells its audience that they haven’t been living up to their standards and in order to restore faith in their current and potential customers, they stopped production and dedicated more than 170,000 employees to working around the clock to fixing repairs .

Jim Lentz , President and COO of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. released a two-minute and 15 second clip on YouTube to officially apologize to those inconvenienced by Toyota’s recall. Notice his demeanor, the pace of his diction, the colors of his clothing and background – all conveying a vulnerability that begs for understanding, patience, faith, loyalty and forgiveness.

Whether a Toyota lover or not, this is a case study that will go down in history for how to deal with a global customer experience that not only affected customer loyalty but also their safety . You be the judge of how their campaign might better serve you in your particular industry.