If you’re self-employed, or you’re a consultant or contractor who has to track billable time and / or submit timesheets in order to get paid, I’m sure you’ve found that a really good time tracking program can be an essential tool. 

I saw this asked about at the Everythingiphone forums earlier today – where a forum member was looking for just such a program for iPhone.  That’s always been a must-have sort of program for me too, as I’ve worked as an IT / network consultant.  So I decided to check out a web app I’d looked at around a year ago -SlimTimer. 

Some quick thoughts on using SlimTimer on the iPhone and some more screengrabs after the break …

One of SlimTimer’s straplines is ‘Make love not timesheets’. Pretty clever strapline, and an indication that SlimTimer aims to make time tracking very easy.

And it does. Here’s the quick rundown on how it works:

• Sign up at the SlimTimer site (it’s free)
• Create one or many tasks – one for each client or project you’re working on, or whatever works with your methods and activities
• Now you’re ready to go. Once you have at least one task created, you just hit the Open Timer link on SlimTimer’s home page and tap once on your task – that will start the timer.  The next time you tap on that task, the timer stops. Close your browser window, walk away, suffer a system crash etc. – it keeps timing until you go back and tap that task to stop it.
• You can run reports on your activity, and print them or download them in .csv format

SlimTimer is not (yet) optimized for the iPhone, but the majority of its screens look pretty good on it. I found it relatively easy to navigate through screens to create and manage tasks, and to select and run reports on my time and billing status.

One slight glitch I found was with bookmarking  its Timer window. If I went back to the bookmarked instance of the page, it did not seem to want to let me zoom in at all and get to a viable viewing size.  My quick workaround was just to bookmark the home page and hit the Timer link from there – then re-sizing and zooming played nice for me.

I’m not sure what (if any) security options are available for SlimTimer – but it strikes me that you can use it in such a way that there’s really not much information that is useful to anyone but yourself.

Now for a few more screengrabs of the program:

That’s the Timer window on the left, with the ‘Finding New Apps’ task clocking up time – not sure who will want to pay me for that one.  On the right is a listing of active tasks.

And above is the initial Run Reports screen, where you can start selecting your report criteria.

I apologize for the ropy quality of the screengrabs – still figuring out how to take decent pics of the beautiful screen. And by that I mean that I’ve given up and my lovely wife is working on it for me  

SlimTimer is compatible with the following browsers: FireFox 1.5+, Camino, IE 6+, Opera and Safari.  For more information, and to give SlimTimer a try, go HERE

I’m still very new to the iPhone and to the whole process of finding programs for all the things I want to do on it. So … if anyone knows of any other time tracking programs that work well on the iPhone, please tell us about them. Or let us know what you think of this one …