Futuramo creates SaaS apps to provide a collaborative workspace for teams. Futuramo Time Tracker is an app used to track, analyze, and manage time, free for teams of up to 3 users, and $6 per license for each additional user.
$6
per month
Novatime (discontinued)
Score 5.6 out of 10
N/A
From Ascentis, NOVAtime was a set of workforce management solutions providing timekeeping, payroll, leave management, and employee scheduling needs. Ascentis was acquired by UKG in March of 2022, and along with NOVAtime, will be discontinued.
Futuramo is best for when you're working alone on a project, or with a small team, given the glitches with the time tracker and the poor integration with Futuramo Tasks and Projects. Unless you're going to manually calculate the times spent on all tasks individually in order to know the total time spent on the project, I would not recommend using it on projects where you'd be billed per the time spent rather than a fixed amount.
We continue to remain the only professional baseball team that utilizes NOVAtime for our scheduling of staff, mostly because it was designed to schedule hospital workers. The lag time when updating the ASM is extremely time consuming and the inability to work in multiple internet tabs or windows makes it that much more inefficient. I am sure it is a fantastic system for other organizations but it continues to be a challenge for us.
The biggest pro of Futurama Time tracker is that it comes bundled with other tools. These are "Projects, Tasks, Virtual Tickets, Time Tracker, and Icons." This means I can track the time spent on each task within a project.
Time Tracker is easy to use, all you need to do is go to time tracker, enter the task you want to track, choose what project and clients it's under, and then click the play/start icon.
For projects that involve collaborating with others (either external freelancers I'm managing, or my staff) I can track the time spent on each task by each user. So I know how long each person spent on their task and how it related to the estimated time. This way I know if the project will take longer or shorter than estimated.
I'ver been using Futuramo for almost 2 years, primarily because they reached out to me to be one of the first users/testers. I've also shared some glitches that could be improved but the timer glitch is still there. When I start the timer to track a project, instead of the timer to start counting, it remains at 00:00 which is worrying because it makes me feel like it's not actually tracking what I'm working on. I was once 18 mins unto a task and when I checked the tracker it said 00:16 I was so worried I ended the task. Interestingly when I ended the task, it showed the correct time which was 18 minutes. I'm happy the timer was working but I'm also frustrated and in near-panic.
Like TopTracker, I wish there was a way to take screenshots of what I'm doing, that way I can be sure that the rest of the team is actually working on the timed tasks.
In the Time Tracker section of Futuramo, where the tasks timed are listed, I wish it was possible to actually click on any of the tasks there to see things like mouse clicks and keyboard taps. Similar to how Hubstaff and Upwork tracker tracks "productivity" (I'm not sure what this is called).
If you track a task not originally in Futuramo Task but created in Time Tracker, connected to a project or client, when you go to Futuramo Task, it won't be listed there. And when you to go Futuramo Projects, you still wouldn't see it there. I would like to go to Futuramo Project and see all the tasks there, both those timed and those yet to start.
There does need to be more support and knowledge when it comes to alternate workweek schedule types (9/80, etc.), as there have been a few unique challenges with those.
The overall satisfaction within the organization has been luke warm, at best. The software may be more conducive for a hospital but I believe there is a reason why we are the lone baseball team utilizing it.
On the employee's side of things, Novatime is pretty intuitive and fairly easy to use. All they have to do is either press a button to punch in or punch out. If they are entering in their hours, all they have to do is type in the number of hours per day. On the manager's side of things, Novatime is also fairly easy to use. It highlights in red any missed punches and in green any OT that the employee has. There are links on the homepage of the manager's page that will lead them to a list of all their employees' missed punches for a pay period and they can fix them all before payroll is due. Novatime becomes a bit more complicated on the administrator's side. The issues I have run into with Novatime normally come after updates/upgrades to their system. They have been getting better, but the administrator's side is still a bit clunky and takes a while to find what you are looking for. It is not as intuitive as the other sides and takes a bit of computer knowledge to figure it out.
The program itself can be customized in many different ways to meet the needs of the company/organization that it is working with. The charts/graphs on the new homepage are somewhat helpful and link to useful information. It has some really nice scheduling features that allow managers to see the difference between hours expected to work and actual hours worked as well as overtime, absences, and non-scheduled shifts. Processing payroll is quite simple. PTO request off is straightforward.
Increased productivity: Futuramo Time Tracker makes it easy to know how long it'll actually take me to complete a task, and when put together, how long it'd take me to complete a project.
Track Billables: While calculating all the time spent on each task manually was exhausting, once that was done, I knew how long it took me and my team to complete a project and was able to bill my client for just that time.
