Time Doctor is one of the best time management apps that lets you measure the productivity of your employees. Your workforce can be your biggest asset or the most dreaded liability — how you manage them decides which way things would go. Unless you plan a productive workflow with the necessary checks in place, this potential asset could very well turn into a burdensome liability.
The most effective and scientific way to avoid that is by making use of employee time tracking apps. In this Time Doctor review 2021, we will introduce you to one of the best time management apps that lets you track, monitor, and pay your full-time and remote employees.
Why do you need an Employee Time Tracking App?
Efficient employees are the cornerstones of any organization, and unless you invest in them, you may not reach your business goals. At present, most small and mid-sized businesses hire remote employees because it helps reduce overheads. However, when you are roping in the best talent from across the globe, you may have to dedicate a more substantial part of your business capital towards building a highly talented, efficient, and productive workforce.
After building the kind of workforce your business requires, your responsibilities do not end. In fact, this is the point where you need to implement the necessary checks to eliminate the lack of productivity. It is where an employee time tracking app comes in. You particularly require this sort of arrangement in the case of remote employees billed on an hourly, weekly, or monthly basis.
In this Time Doctor review, we’ll introduce you to one of the most comprehensive employee time tracking apps that you can use for your business. Time Doctor is relied upon by large firms such as Verizon, KPMG, PWC, and several others. So, you can be sure that we’ve pulled out one of the best time management apps for you.
What is Time Doctor?
Most small and mid-sized businesses use remote employees through intermediaries, such as freelancing websites or consultants. The most common reason to do this is the lack of technical capabilities required to manage these employees and to track their performance. If you are one such business, then using employee time tracking apps such as Time Doctor can help resolve the issue.
However, it wouldn’t be apt to call Time Doctor an employee time tracking app because it is so much more. You can create invoices, oversee projects, manage time, and monitor employees. You can even find out if someone is spending too much time on Facebook or Twitter. In fact, you can also use it to check your own productivity as you work online, and that’s what the free version lets you do.
Is Time Doctor a Free Employee Time Tracking App?
Yes, Time Doctor is a free Employee Time Tracking App, but the free version is only available for 14 days. During this timeframe, you get to try out limited features and can decide whether or not you wish to continue with a paid subscription plan. Unlike other SaaS products, you don’t have to provide your credit card details to avail of the free trial. Let us now check out Time Doctor’s paid plans and its unique features.
Pricing Plan
In this Time Doctor review, we would like to emphasize on the fantastic pricing offers of this product. There are no complicated contracts, nor any obligation to pay a long-term fee to avail a discount. Instead, the charges are applied on a per-user basis.
The flat pricing plan charges $10 per user per month, which lets you scale up and scale down without any worries. This pricing pattern ensures that you would be charged only when you hire someone and wish to monitor them. During other times, you could suspend payments and keep your account inactive. Let us now dive into some of the most striking features of this employee time tracking app.
User-Friendly Interface
Time Doctor comes with an easy-to-use interface that is very well classified and helps pull out useful data in a flash. As soon as you log in, you can start adding employees and monitor their performance based on the tasks or projects that you assign to them. During the 14 day trial period, you may not be able to invite employees. But you can get used to the software by tracking your own performance analytics.
However, when you purchase the premium version, you can then add employees and assign tasks or projects. So, when you have done that, then on the main page of the dashboard, you can see a lot of things. You get a list of your employees, what they are working on, and the number of hours they’ve logged on that particular day.
Next to their names, you can see green, yellow, and blue bars. They indicate the amount of time spent on various tasks. The green bar represents the time tracked by this employee time tracking app on the desktop. The blue one indicates the time tracked on a mobile device, and the yellow bar denotes manually edited time.
Manage your Projects Efficiently
Small and mid-sized businesses often manage several projects simultaneously, which makes cost analysis a cumbersome process. So, if you wish to exercise better control over your employee-related costs, then this employee time tracking app can help you do that. Time Doctor lets you decide how you want to allocate work and keep track of it.
You could track employee-wise, team-wise, or project-wise, depending on your needs. Being able to choose from these methods allows you ample flexibility to pull out relevant data to make better managerial decisions, as it becomes more convenient to calculate project costs. So, if you run three eCommerce stores and two affiliate websites, then you can easily break down project-wise expenses.
Set Periodical Screencasts
Screencasts are periodical screenshots that Time Doctor captures from your employee’s screen. They confirm that your employees have indeed been working on your project. This feature plays a crucial role in monitoring remote employees hired on an hourly basis. In fact, this is the very feature due to which companies choose to engage employees through freelancing websites. However, they end up paying massive commissions. Instead, you can use this employee time tracking app for just $10 per month.
To activate screencasts in Time Doctor, navigate to User Options under Settings on the dashboard and select how often you wish to capture screencasts for an employee. You can time that anywhere between 3 and 15 minutes or choose to record a video continuously. If the work isn’t sensitive or if your employment agreement does not permit you to capture screencasts, you can simply turn this feature off for any of the employees.
Neglect Tracking when employees are inactive
You can choose to configure settings to set a time limit, after which the software would automatically stop tracking time. As the idle time would not fall into account, this Employee tracking app can help boost productivity and increase organizational efficiency.
Depending on your company’s policies and internal protocols, you may even set the maximum limit for the idle time spent. With this feature, Time Doctor ensures that the time spent away from the computer is not taken into account. So, if your employees are billing you for 9 hours a day, then you would get it’s worth.
Reports
You can use Time Doctor to get an overview of how productive your employees have been. You can do it either through a high-level summary or through detailed reports. This is something you would expect from the best time management apps. For a high-level summary, you need to navigate to Activity Summary, under Reports. The Activity Summary compiles vital metrics. Some of these metrics are the total time that an employee has put in, and then bifurcates it into idle time and productive time.
However, if you wish to dig deeper, then you could check the number of hours tracked, the productivity report, or check the web and app usage. You can use these tools in several ways, such as to reward productive employees, block unproductive apps, etc. This could help if you are managing multiple projects and have issued specific instructions to your employees. For instance, the number of hours spent on a particular project.
You can use this employee time tracking app to determine the amount of time dedicated to various projects. So, if you have given out orders to your employees to prioritize a particular project, then you can easily keep track of them. It works exceptionally well when you are paying different hourly rates to the same employee for work done on various projects.
Easy Integration
You can easily download the Time Doctor app and integrate it with various project management and payroll tools. Some of these tools are Google Apps, Slack, Jira, Trello, Asana, Redmine, Payroll Hero, etc. So, whichever tool you have been using can easily be connected to this employee time tracking app. It makes it easier for you to start using this time tracker without disrupting your current ecosystem.
Build a Responsible Team
Unless your employees are in charge of running social media campaigns as part of their job, you’d want them to limit the amount of time spent on social media platforms. You can do that quite politely and professionally by popping up reminders through this employee time management app.
These reminders would gently nudge your employees to get back to work. Time Doctor lets you configure settings that would show up reminders to your employees after they spend a certain amount of time on certain websites or apps.
Payroll
Time Doctor’s dashboard lets you set up payment-related information for each employee. Next to every employee’s name, you can set up the number of hours worked and their hourly rates. Also, you can make manual adjustments to it. So, if you sent a particular employee on a client visit, which involves working away from the desk, then you could adjust the payment.
This way, you have reliable data as well as the flexibility to make manual adjustments. In fact, you can even use your credit card to set up automatic payments for your employees. Now that makes it an employee time tracking app cum payroll tool.
EmpMonitor: An Alternative to Time Doctor
In case you are interested in knowing more about another tool that can potentially do what Time Doctor does, EmpMonitor is your answer. It is the best Time Doctor alternative and is pretty affordable too.
It is a very simple yet effective monitoring software for organizations and teams of almost all sizes. EmpMonitor comes with an accessible and easy to operate dashboard. It provides a comprehensive picture of how your team is performing at the workplace.
You can log into your EmpMonitor account from any remote device. Meaning, you can get a quick check on your employees’ work status from anywhere, any time. EmpMonitor also comes with various features like screenshot monitoring, keystroke logging, etc. You can set the alerts and goals and compare the least and most productive days accordingly. They offer easy customization and a lot more.
The best part of EmpMonitor is that it is a silent tracking app, and comes with stealth mode. Meaning, your employees won’t know when you are keeping an eye on them while this app is still running on the background.
All in all, it’s a great employee monitoring software.
Also Read, Remote Team Management — Challenges and Solutions Using EmpMonitor
Conclusion
To sum it up, Time Doctor is not just an employee time tracking app but one of the best time management apps that provide actionable insights. It tells you correctly how things are flowing in the organization and what you can do to fix them. You can use this time management app for project management, employee monitoring, payroll, and more. Moreover, it has a highly reputed clientele such as KPMG, PWC, etc. which demonstrates its worth. So, in our opinion, Time Doctor is a great Human Resource Management tool that comes with a reasonable price tag.
Originally Published On: SaasTrac
About The Author
SaasTrac is one of the trusted places where users can find reviews on different Saas Products, Software, and Platforms. Our major goal is to let users know the detailed and the most helpful information possible about every product — the good, the bad, and the ugly in the SaaS space.
