And what if you have lots of people using your Freckle account? Multiple office locations? Many internal departments? Many external contractors?

Do find yourself you need to manually repeat clicking lots of people to get the right data from reports? What if you could group people together and quickly run reports on them?

Introducing Teams!

Use teams to group and quickly run reports on people

Use teams to “tag” people into categories (a person can be a member of as many teams as you want!). For example, you could have a team for each of your business locations (e.g. “Philly”, “London”), for each of your departments (e.g. “Sales”, “R&D”, “HR”) and some special teams to be able to quickly run reports on certain groups of people (e.g. “External”, “Summer Interns”). Mix and match! Freckle is flexible and will adapt to your needs.

To create and manage teams, look for “People & Teams” in the navigation bar on the left. Note that only Supervisors can create, edit and disband teams. Both Supervisors and Leaders can view teams and use them for reporting.

It’s also now much easier to select individual people or custom groups of people when running reports. There’s a completely new field that you can use to search for people, group people by status and permission level. Archived people are hidden by default so there’s less clutter—but you can always search for them or click the little triangle to show them. Power-user tip: click a section heading (e.g. “ACTIVE”) to quickly add all people in that section to your selection.

The new Teams feature is available on our Team plan, the Organization plan and with custom Enterprise plans. If you have an older subscription plan, ask us about upgrade options!

Create dynamic reports on teams and project groups

To make it easier to share data with your clients or with managers, Reports now support the direct selection and saving of teams and project groups. This means that you can now select a project group and share the report with a client—with projects added to the project group later automagically showing up in the shared report for your client! (The same works for teams as well!)

This new feature is available on all Freckle accounts.

Cumulative billable vs. unbillable chart for reports

Need to know you worst performing projects? Have the feeling that last winter was large unproductive? Reports now show you a chart over time, with your billable and unbillable hours visualized. This takes the guesswork out of finding unproductive time and will alert you if you have any spikes of unbillable hours.

Even for projects and time that is all billable, you’ll be able to quickly identify work patterns and see when the time logged in your report has occurred.

This new feature is available on all Freckle accounts.

Quick-glance report summary

Also new is a quick total of time and the number of entries in your report, so you’ll instantly see if your search and filter criteria gave you the result you wanted.

This new feature is available on all Freckle accounts.

It’s gonna be a hot summer… with even more features coming!

If you have feedback on our new features or anything in Freckle, we’re always happy to listen and help: stay cool and drop us a line at support@letsfreckle.com!

The post Teams: Successful businesses are a team effort appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.

Unfortunately, we at Freckle can’t manifest a fairy ATM machine with a penchant for life coaching as your next client or ours for that matter.

What we can do, thanks to our newest feature of Recurring Budgets, is make calculating the ever shifting equation of time and projects a lot more simple to figure. And nearly effortless to track.

Recurring budgets are easy to enjoy as a pie someone else made and delivered to your desk.

Recurring budgets are super-useful, whatever the size of your Freckle account maybe be. They work for freelancers, team supervisors, and project leads in larger organizations.

What Recurring Budgets Can Help You Achieve

Need help getting enough time in for those aspirational time goals, like building new skills? Or perhaps you want to keep tabs and have hard limits on weekly, monthly, or quarterly hours when you bill by the hour? No problem!

Aspirational

Want to become a Wizard with the knitting needles? Set aside 5 hours a week towards your new craft! Let Freckle calculate how much time you are actually spending towards your goal, and see what soft, warm magic can be crocheted in a few months.

This info will be mapped on the project page and can be found as a pie chart on the dashboard. Self-reflect about how good that Etsy cat sweater store will actually be if you only spend 30 minutes a week out of that 5 hours knitting!

This is Haskell. He’s cute.

Hard Boundaries and Shifting Time

Is a client paying for a strict amount of hours when it comes to maintenance or anything else?

Break down how many hours a week or month or quarterly you will need for maintenance over the course of the project. Set how often you want that data to start afresh, then let recurring budgets do the heavy lifting.

Additionally, with data collected supervisors and team leaders can compare crew time to see who is being weighed down and who has extra bandwidth to take on new roles. It seems Dave in Marketing has more than enough time to help Allan in Art Direction get those 4,000 cat sweaters looking adorable and loaded on to your customers new website.

How to Set Up Recurring Projects

To enable recurring budgets (or just normal budgets that don’t recur!) go to a project page and click on Settings, then click on Budget. In the Repeats downdown menu, you can choose weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly repeating budgets. You decide when the clock should restart.

Once a Recurring Budget is set, then keeping tabs on how the venture is progressing is a matter of glancing over a graph on the project page. See how much time has been spent and billed per period over the course of the project. Free bonus: You also get this graph if the project doesn’t have any budgets! And we divvy it up between billable and unbillable time for you.

Recurring Budgets are definitely not as sexy as pools of money to spend on life goals—but it is sexy in that useful practical way.

That’s what we at Freckle strive to give to you: useful, practical digital tools to help you accomplish your goals, without wasting time and money.

Still feeling unsure about how to enable Recurring Budgets to work for you? Get on the schedule for a weekly live webinar with our Sales wonder-woman Rasa Vella. Have specific questions? Send our support team an email at support@letsfreckle.com and our Support Guru Amber Gohn will make everything alright.

The post Recurring Budgets! (also, cat sweaters) appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.

“Hey, did you log your time from last week?”

You have a team to manage. Maybe it’s only 3 or 4 people. Maybe you’re leading projects in three different departments and have 46 folks that should be logging time in Freckle every day. Regardless of crew size, you need everyone to log their time consistently. You also need to make sure that tags are appropriate for each part of the project. This is especially true when it comes to billing for lengthy multi-person projects. Hmmm…if only there was a way for supervisors to run a quick weekly check-in to see whether people are logging their time and tagging what they do? If only there was a way to approve timesheets!

Thanks to Freckle’s newest feature keeping-up with team member time logs and tags is now easy to do. Let Freckle help you avoid some standard issue group logging messes.

PROBLEM SCENARIO 1: Office. Monday morning. Need to prep and send the invoice for a big multi-week project. Should be easy. But wait, Dave in Marketing (it’s *always* Dave in Marketing) hasn’t logged any of his time for weeks! And of course, he doesn’t remember how many hours he worked on the project you’re about to bill a major client for. Thanks Dave, great way to start a Monday.

Or…

PROBLEM SCENARIO 2: Office. Monday morning. First things first, coffee, then running a report to make sure your team logged their time correctly before moving into the next week. Should be painless. But wait, Dave in Marketing went back in and edited all his time logs last week to the tag #cats. He thought it’d be funny. And now you just spilled coffee on your favorite work shirt. Damn it, Dave! If only Freckle had a way to lock past entries to make sure they didn’t get edited!

Well, actually…

Enter timesheet approval!

NEW ROUTINE: Every Monday morning after coffee have the team send you their timesheet URL for approval. This is a smart practice to get going at the beginning of a new project. If Dave won’t send you his log, run a typical report of the time frame needed. Hmmm…looks like Dave only worked an hour at cat petting last week. Weird, he was in the office for more than an hour and none of your clients are paying the company to pet cats. Time to correct Dave’s log, lock his editing capabilities, and send him an all caps email. Good thing you caught this three months before the invoice is due. 

Here’s how to set-up the time sheet approval and edit lock feature: 

Once the report is solid (that is, after you’ve caught and fixed the weeks missed logs and “witty” project names) click the top right hand corner yellow button on the Freckle screen. 

A gray “Approve Entries” dialogue box will pop up. Click on the blue “Approve Entries” button in the bottom right.

By hitting approve, you are also approving the tag names being used in the report. This automatically locks your employees from being able to edit time logs or tags for all previous reports for this project. No more #cat-petting Dave. It’s that easy to do timesheet approval in Freckle!

Bonus Features!

Reports can now be filtered and grouped by approval status. Keep track of which supervisors mark reports as approved. The info for approval status (and the approving user) can be exported as a CSV or Excel.

Still have questions? Join a Freckle live tour to get the answers you need!

The post Timesheet approval and locking entries appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.

Most of us use as many tricks and tools as we can to remember birthdays, phone numbers and events. We sync our calendars with our contacts and set reminders to check our wall full of post-it notes.

Passwords, email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, zip codes, area codes, html code, code red Mountain Dew.

*cue Edvard Munch scream face*

photo cc: Xoan Baltar

There’s got to be a better way!

Oh, hang on. Don’t totally loose it yet. Freckle is here to help.

New Freckle Feature: Built-in Suggestions from Previous Invoices

Now not only will Freckle remember the info you enter into the customizable invoice fields, but it’ll suggest addresses and names saved from previous invoices.

Just mouse over these fields to see suggestions from previous invoices:

• Recipient’s Details
• Your Company Name
• Your Company Details
• Invoice title
• Description/Text
• Invoice footer

Put down the old school address book and the stack of post-it notes. Don’t worry about logging into that client contact tool you use. Let Freckle do hard labor and remember your invoicing details for you.

The post New Feature: Built-in Suggestions from Previous Invoices appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.

What’s The Struggle? The Struggle is the cousin of the common cold. Always popping up when you least expect it and when you really don’t want it.

Picture this: It’s after lunch and you’ve totally hit your stride. You’ve got some sweet jams pumping, you’re high-fiving yourself and your co-workers, your Freckle Timer is going strong and you’re ready to log some time.

Then, BAM! Out of no where, The Struggle. You know you created a tag for this task, but you can’t find it anywhere. You’ve used it before… Or haven’t you? And your supervisor just addressed the too many similar tags issue with your team.

You throw your hands up in frustration and yell, CURSE YOU INTERNET GODS, CURSE YOU!

photo cc: clarkk

It’s all going to be okay. We’ve faced The Struggle before too. And the Freckle developers have come up with some pretty cool features to help battle that pesky little devil.

New Freckle Feature: Sorting Tags!

Recently we launched the tag permission feature. So you and your team can specify who can create new tags. Freckle will even warn you that the tag is new by highlighting the tag red instead of yellow.

In the hashtag completer we’ve now made it possible for you to sort your tags either by popularity or in alphabetical order for faster searching. You can see up to 1,000 tags! (On slower computers, Freckle will show fewer tags so it doesn’t get slow. You can still search for all tags tho!)

Then, in the case where you do need to do some tag clean up, we’ve also improved tag merging. Larger tag mergers will now take place in the background. So you can go about our business without any care in the world, and we’ll send you an email when the merge is complete.

We’ve all faced off against The Struggle at one time or another, but you don’t have to do it alone. Freckle has some new features to help you find the tags you’re looking for quickly and easily.

Have a suggestion about how we can make using hashtags even better? Send us a little something something at support@letsfreckle.com, we love hearing from you!

The post Sorting tags, or: The Struggle is Over appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.

Whether it’s a simple mistake like using the #emails tag instead of #email, or something a little more complicated like getting halfway through typing the hashtag “permissions” and hitting enter. Embarrassing yet fabulous…

Here are some other hilarious accidental tags straight out of the Freckle internal account:

We’re happy to announce tag restrictions for teams!

Restricting which people can create tags

Freckle defaults to allowing all users create new tags. This works well for many customers, but if you have a large account you might want to let people choose from a pre-configured list of tags instead. Freckle has a configuration option that allows you to do just that!

To customize permissions, you need to be the Account Owner.

To restrict which permission levels can create and manage (edit, merge and delete) tags:

1. Click Plans & Billing in the green navigation sidebar.
2. Click Account Settings.
3. In the Customize Permissions section, choose which permission levels are allowed to create tags.
4. Scroll down to the end of the page and click Save settings.

What happens when a person not allowed to create tags tries to save new tags?

First off, we warn users that tags aren’t known when filling out the tags and description field. The tag itself is highlighted red and there’s a warning message that new tags can’t be created.

When saving and there’s still unknown tags in the description, Freckle will alert the person trying to use new tags and ask them to either edit their entry, or to have the tags replaced with plain text.

When tags are replaced with plain text, the hash (#) sign is stripped.

And here you go—take that, misspelled tags!

The post New Feature: Restricting Which People Can Create Tags appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.

• Why can’t Americans drive manual cars?
• Why on Earth doesn’t America use the Metric System?
• Why is it so hard to get week numbers in my calendar apps?

All very valid questions.  All deserving of an answer.

As an American myself, I should be able to clear up some of the confusion. Let’s see:

1. American’s don’t drive manual cars because they drive stick or automatic cars.
2. American’s don’t use the Metric System because we fought for our freedom in The Revolutionary War.
3. You don’t have to battle with your calendar in Freckle to see week numbers! 

No joke. That is a true fact!  Freckle now supports week numbers in both the Quick Entry Box calendar and the Quick Reports calendar.

To see week numbers in your Freckle calendars all you have to do is mouse over your Freckle avatar and click “Settings & Profile”.

From there you’ll click the “Date, Time & Formats” tab and choose to start your week on Monday.

Not only can you see week numbers in your Freckle calendars, but you can see them in your reports! When you choose the “weekly timesheet” filter, Freckle will remember that you set your week to start on Monday & show you the week number for that week. Choosing the “week (Mon – Sun) filter will also show you the week number for that week.

So stop scratching your head trying to make sense of the world. Instead, use Freckle to see if you’re free week 37 and if you’ll finish that project before week 40.

The post Week Numbers for European Frecklers appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.

Whenever I get an integration request, I make note of who asked for the integration, and eventually how many times that integration has been requested.

Soooometimes I’ll pad the numbers a bit, if I feel that this integration will help a particular set of customers.

Alright, so maybe “a bit” was a slight understatement. But that’s not the point of this blog post.

The point is that integrations make your life easier and they save you time. And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re all about saving you time.

Everyday we use a number of different products and tools to help us get our work done. If you’re using Freckle to track your time, there’s a very good chance that you use Basecamp to manage your projects. If that’s true, then you don’t want to be pulling double duty and entering the same information into both tools. (See what I did there? IFTTT is amazing.)

Now you don’t have to. When you use Freckle’s Basecamp integration, your Basecamp projects will automagically appear in Freckle. You can even archive projects in Basecamp and they’ll quietly float off to archive-land in Freckle.

This works with older Basecamp Classic and with the new Basecamp accounts. So no matter when you started to use Basecamp to manage your projects, you can easily integrate with your Freckle account. Here’s how:

STEP ONE

Click Integrations & Imports in the green navigation sidebar.

STEP TWO

Click the Connect to Basecamp… button

STEP THREE

Allow Freckle to access your Basecamp account by clicking the green ‘Yes, I’ll allow access button‘.

If you’re already logged into Basecamp, Basecamp will ask you for permission to allow Freckle to access your Basecamp or Basecamp Classic account. If you’re not already logged in to Basecamp you’ll be asked to log in first.

STEP FOUR

Freckle will either connect you to your Basecamp account, or if you have multiple Basecamp accounts, Freckle will ask you to choose the account you want to connect to. Syncing happens automatically but you can choose to to manually start a sync (though that probably won’t ever be necessary). Once the syncing is complete, you’ll see what projects were synced to your Freckle account.

And that’s it! Easy as pie. Your Basecamp projects will all sync to your Freckle account and you can track time to them without having to create a new one.

Read up on this and other integrations on our documentation site!

Now go forth and track thine time!

The post Project proliferation? Sync your projects from Basecamp! appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.

Long story short—Freckle supports one-click generation of files for Excel from any report! Look out for the light blue Excel download button!

It will take but a few seconds to generate your file. Look for it in your browsers download window. Here’s Safari:

Boom! One click later, and you’ll get the full report right there in Excel, waiting for you to pivot, chart and cross-reference all the things:

Are you building something awesome with Freckle’s Excel exports? Do you have any wishes or comments on them? Let us know!

The post Do you love to pivot? Freckle supports Excel 2016! appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.

Every group of friends, every team, every family has a token Windows Rights Activist.  They’re the person who you turn to with all of your very import Windows questions.

Like, “Hypothetically speaking, would Steve Jobs and Bill Gates make a good team on The Amazing Race?” 

They’re also the person who showed you the light.  The bright and shiny light of Chrome, Google Chrome that is.

Most of us here on the Freckle team are Mac users, but thankfully we’ve got our very own Windows Rights Activist, Amber Gohn.

Amber is always campaigning for equal Windows Rights and thank [insert your preferred computer God here] because for a while the Mac menubar was getting all the love.  Well, not anymore!

If you’re the token Windows Rights Activist of your group, or if you’re just an avid Chrome user, you can get a shiny Freckle icon in your taskbar!

Pinning Freckle to your Windows taskbar is super easy! It only takes a few clicks.

1. Make sure your Freckle window is the focused, most recent one
2. Click the “Menu” icon in the top right, aka the ≡ hamburger icon
3. Select “More tools”
4. Choose “Create application shortcuts”
5. Make sure the “pin to taskbar” box is checked
6. Click “Create”

Now you’ve got yourself an awesome new pin. You can now always open Freckle with one click from your taskbar and get right to work!
Windows Time Tracking just got a whole lot easier!

Let us know what you think or pow-wow with our very own Windows Rights Activist at support@letsfreckle.com.

The post Windows Rights Activists, Unite! appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.