Replicon's Project Time Tracking suite of applications allows users to track billable time, manage project hours and cost, track project expenses, as well as manage paid time off.
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SherpaDesk
Score 8.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
SherpaDesk is a help desk / ticketing platform with time tracking, invoice generation, and business intelligence capabilities.
I believe it is well suited for a small sized company, like my previous one, that does not want any IT overhead to onboard a new tool. This tool is available online and can be accessed via the internet. It has all the necessary components to help you record your activity. But the solution in its current form is not scalable. [I've] Given few of my reasons I feel this is not well suited for a large company (like the one I currently work at).
It allowed me to fill my work time sheet. Every week I had to fill this. Based on the numbers the company keeps track of which days I worked.
It reminded me to fill the time sheets constantly and also notifies me when it gets approved. So I never really forgot to fill it.
It allowed me to see my vacation days left, and plan ahead.
It had a list of holiday dates which was very handy to plan my trips or vacation.
It had categorization by department and my view of time sheets was only limited to me. I could not see others time sheets, and except for my manager, nobody else could look into mine.
It had internet access, which meant I could fill my sheets anywhere. It came in handy while working from home where a VPN connection may not be present. I also guess that this service being online meant no extra effort from IT department side.
The UI in my opinion was too simple. Calendar views were pretty stale.
I don't believe there was a mobile app for this, or this site worked nicely when opened on small devices.
A better view of my time could have been shown. At the time I could only see small excel like boxes filled with numbers. Graphs, or some other visualization of remaining days would have been lucrative.
Very stupid login page. We had to fill "company name" at the login page and this name had to match exactly to what was set in the database. It was frustrating and I always had to refer my notes to get that right.
There wasn't any preselection option which made it hard to do it fast. If I can only set a few fields (because we had long list of dropdowns to choose from) then this process could be much smoother.
A major issue was not being able to see my team-mates schedule or calendar. E.g. when are they taking vacations. So I had to pester them offline to get this information. Many times due to inter-team miscommunication we didn't know about others vacation days during planning. A central place where I could see this information would have helped me a lot.
I believe it is not in my power to select the best tool. It depends on whatever company I work for. It just happens that we use a different system (and I don't even know if this is an internal system, or another online tool). But I do like my current system. It has a better UI, and more detailed insights about my time. It also shows my pay stubs and other small neat information like tax papers to help me organize. It also has notifications when something new comes up. All these features I think I lacked in Replicon (or maybe my company didn't have access to these).
When looking for solutions for our business, I personally looked at Aautotask. I am not the decision maker so I don't know what my boss looked at in full. Autotask seems good. It looked like it got a bit complicated and may be for very large enterprise customers. Just lots of features that we don't need.
Replicon helped me maintain a record of my time. This helped during my assessment where my manager could see my work hours.
Replicon was easy to use, so I didn't spend my precious time filling sheets in this site. As far as I can remember, this site only gave me problem once, but was never down.
Though a good tool, I actually never got the use case of recording your time sheets. I think it will be pretty hard for an employee to just fill the time sheet and not show up for work. There are so many meetings and people around you, that you cannot fake your presence. So I feel there is no need to fill time sheets. It is a functionality with no real world solution.
As a single freelance consultant Sherpadesk has exceptional ROI because it's free but if my company had more support people I would definetly go with SherpaDesk again.
