
Show HN: Tiempo – The fastest way to track time and get paid - tadmilbourn
http://www.tiempoapp.com/invoices
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jprince
Currently, I use On The Job, which works really well at invoicing and time
tracking. What I do is I PDF the invoice and email it to clients, and have
them pay me via Square Cash. As long as I don't do more than 2500$ of work for
any particular client in a given week, they can easily use that.

It costs them nothing and it costs me nothing to do this, and there is no
percentages taken. Also, we both understand when payment is due, and normally
the client pays on the due date. If they don't pay on the due date no amount
of pretty software is going to make them more likely to, for obvious reasons.
How do you plan to get me to give away 3.9% of my income to use a more
integrated service?

~~~
tadmilbourn
Jprince, that's a nice setup. You've manually put together many of the core
components Tiempo offers. It sounds like you're getting paid quickly, at low
cost, and its a good experience for both you and your customers.

In fact, what you could do is use Tiempo for your time tracking and use the
result to create your PDF invoice and continue with your Square Cash payment
process. Compared to On the Job, Tiempo's time tracking is free and available
on mobile devices. So you wouldn't have to be attached to your computer to
track time.

But, what Tiempo Instant Invoices does is allow folks that aren't as technical
to get all of that benefit that you've already wired together in one place.
And, as I've said elsewhere in the comments, we'll add more payment options
(that are lower cost) in the future.

~~~
diminoten
Hackers like us forget how hard some of this stuff is to put together, and
time consuming.

Once you've invested time into your homegrown system, your product inertia
grows a great deal. "Why do x when you could just do y,z,a,b,c together?"
should be a red flag to folks like us that we're not really suggesting
something easier for other people, even if it's easier for us.

~~~
romanhn
Reminds me of this Dropbox critique when it first got featured on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

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pw
This looks like a fine product and kudos to its creators, but I hate that
products like this encourage bad practices for freelancers/consultants.
Basically, if you're charging in way that requires software to track how much
clients owe you, you're doing it wrong. Take the advice of tptacek and patio11
and charge by the day or the week, not the hour.

~~~
eswat
Yeah, which is a shame for good apps like FreshBooks and probably Tiempo that
handle the other heavy lifting like invoicing but don’t play nice with a
day/week workflow.

~~~
tadmilbourn
What are the differences that you see between a day/week workflow and an
hourly one?

~~~
andrewfong
As someone who used to bill in six minute increments, I can tell you that the
smaller your billing increment is, the more life sucks.

Tracking by the hour (or less) introduces a whole new level of mental
overhead. Most people are pretty good at recalling the major items they worked
on in a day -- and if they can't, they can usually reconstruct what happened
by examining e-mail history, commit logs, work product, etc. It's a lot harder
to recall how many _hours_ you spent on something though. Based on personal
experience at least, if I'm not actively using a timer or using some kind of
software that records what I'm doing in real time, my personal recollection
tends to be way off. Even when I am using a timer, I often run into issues
like forgetting to turn off the timer when I take a gym or coffee break.

There's also all sorts of performance anxiety when it comes to hourly
tracking. Not all hours are equal. I'm personally way more productive in the
morning than I am right after lunch. But as far as invoicing goes, an hour's
an hour. So I can either feel guilty about billing two hours for something
that should have taken only one or I can write an hour off, which introduces
even more overhead. With daily or weekly billing, a lot of that gets smoothed
out.

~~~
tadmilbourn
Thanks for the context... did you have agreements with your client where you
billed them by the day or week? If so, did you still have to "itemize" your
day and provide some record of what you did? Did you ever work for multiple
clients over the course of a single day?

Sorry for the barrage of questions, just trying to better understand the use
case and think of potential solutions.

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tijs
Is it normal in the US to pay supplier invoices through credit card payments?
Nobody would pay 3,9% on amounts of more than a few hundred dollars right? A
normal project invoice for say a web studio would usually be well over 10k
which means you're regularly paying more than $400 to get a single invoice
processed? Am i missing something or do people actually do this? Not trying to
be snarky, truly curious.

~~~
tadmilbourn
Great points. We've actually talked to folks whose total fees were about 6%
after all was said and done. It's crazy, but it does happen.

In your example, what I'd ask is if the web studio would be willing to pay
$400 to get that $10k weeks earlier than they otherwise would have. That might
be a good cash flow outcome for them.

All that being said, you're exactly right, the fee structure makes
transactions of a certain size not make sense if you're doing more regular
invoicing. That's why we want to add more payment methods over time that are
lower cost.

~~~
bronson
I tried your service until I discovered you want 4% per invoice. That's 4% of
my income. For comparison, California taxes (effective) were 5.8% of my
income.

Please mention this up front!

When you add a calendar overview and a more sane pay structure, I'm happy to
look again. Thanks.

~~~
pc86
They are only taking 1% - the other 2.9% is by virtue of using Stripe which
has their fee. But I agree it should be disclosed more openly that you're
agreeing to give them 1% right off the top by using the service.

~~~
bronson
Except I have no desire to use Stripe. Since they force it, it seems to me
they're responsible for the entire 3.9%.

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thenduks
Looks very nice. I've been using timelyapp.com and this seems to cover my use-
case similarly but free - yay!

A couple points of feedback:

\- As a person who lives anywhere but the US, the date format is all wrong and
will constantly be a source of annoyance. The datepicker helps, but the csv
outputs dates like 07/08/14... I have no idea what date that is. How about ISO
standards? 2014/07/08 is completely unambiguous to everyone.

\- I often do a whole day of work. Say like 4+ hours for a single client. I
write a lot of notes during that time for my own reference. So I really need
to be able to: type notes while the timer is going, and also for the notes to
respect my line breaks (otherwise it just comes out jibberish if I try to
write bullet points/etc).

\- I guess I will use the submitted->approved flow for pending->billed. Not
sure if this is something you intend... I 'approve' my own hours, but I would
like to be able to mark hours as having been billed so I don't accidentally do
it twice :)

\- The little bubble next to my entries says 'RF', I assume that's a place for
an avatar. Am I blind and missing how to set one?

But yea overall it looks great!

~~~
JoshTriplett
> How about ISO standards? 2014/07/08 is completely unambiguous to everyone.

Agreed; however, ISO 8601 is actually YYYY-MM-DD, not YYYY/MM/DD. So,
2014-07-08.

~~~
thenduks
Ha good catch! Honestly slashes or dashes would be fine with me though :)

~~~
Jedd
No no ... they wouldn't be fine with you, because no one else is using
slashes, and dashes are something we should be encouraging everyone (but
particularly our cousins across the pond) to embrace. :)

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tadmilbourn
We’re taking a slightly different approach to invoicing for billable hours.
From talking with freelancers, independent contractors, agencies, and other
professional services companies, we found that there’s a significant delay
between when work is done and when the invoice actually goes out. Then,
there’s even more delay between when that invoice goes out and when it gets
paid.

We’re trying to reduce both of those delays as much as possible.

By sending a notification once hours have been approved, we remove the delay
between when the work is done and when someone “runs invoicing.”

By making the notification personable and easily viewed on mobile devices, we
increase the speed with which the customers pay.

That’s the general concept! I’d love to hear any feedback and comments the HN
community has!

~~~
davedx
In my experience as a contractor, the payment period is usually in the
contract. The terms I've seen the most are 30 days and my current contract is
35 days.

No amount of reducing friction will reduce that payment period. I know of one
contractor who negotiated a higher rate by increasing the period. Companies
typically run long invoice cycles, and you don't stand a chance of changing
that to anything shorter usually.

~~~
tadmilbourn
That's a fair point. It's going to be tough to change those types of companies
because they tend to have people that manage and optimize cash flow (i.e. pay
bills on the last day possible without incurring penalties).

From our experience with small businesses Intuit (the Tiempo team is all
former Intuit employees), we know there's a large swath of companies that
aren't as complicated or as rigorous. For those companies, just getting the
bill taken care of and out of the way is a benefit. Those are the companies
we'll focus on first.

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yzap
The design looks top notch and beyond that, it looks like you've really
identified a specific part of the time tracking/invoicing workflow that has
not yet been solved well and you have come up with a solution that completely
nails that pain point.

Great work guys! : )

~~~
tadmilbourn
Thanks! We appreciate it.

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jetro223
I also run a time tracking service
([http://www.spiketime.net](http://www.spiketime.net) <\- sorry, I had to ;-))
and just tried Tiempo.

I really like the idea of instant invoices and the approval process (just the
fee is a little bit high, I think).

Some random thoughts: \- What's the difference between an employee and
contractor - is it just the label or do they have different rights in your
app?

\- When you start the mobile app for the first time without using the website
before you don't know the meaning of the icons for draft, submitted and
approved (I thought the icon for approved was the save-button).

\- When using the timer I can't select a customer/service when the timer runs
as you do this when you click stop timer. Also it isn't possible to make any
notes on a running timer

~~~
tadmilbourn
Thanks for the feedback! And there's no shame in that plug.

Employee and Contractor don't have much difference within Tiempo in terms of
rights. But, they have profound differences with how they're treated once you
integrate with accounting software like QuickBooks Online.

We plan to get rid of the "Draft" status as it's underused and will allow us
to simplify the design further (just Submitted and Approved status).

The timer not allowing for details until it's stopped is something we'll
address shortly.

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vesh
I currently use Harvest for time tracking, creating invoices and sending it
out. It would be nice to see a list of features and costs without signing up.
It looks like time tracking, approval is free to use. Connecting to Quickbooks
costs 10$/month. To create and send invoices you have to choose to receive
payments through Tiempo, which will cost 3.9% of the invoice amount. Customers
get an option to pay by credit card.

I can see this simplifies the process for a lot of people. Being able to send
invoices without using the payment service is personally a deal breaker as it
would be way higher than the 19$ I currently pay.

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Pvt_Hudson
Is this available outside of the United States?

~~~
tadmilbourn
The time tracking aspect works anywhere (there are apps for iOS and Android as
well). For invoicing, to accept payment, we're currently set up to work with
US Bank Accounts. Your customers can pay you as long as they have a credit
card.

Over time, we want to be as globally available as possible. That means more
countries and more methods to pay.

~~~
Pvt_Hudson
Thanks! This looks promising.

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pc86
I see in one of the screenshots there is a 3.9% fee - is that your fee as well
as credit card processing?

~~~
kkilat
Yep, that's Stripe's 2.9% credit card processing fee, and then 1% that we
take.

Our goal in the future is to open up and accept other online payment options
that have lower overall fees, as well though. We definitely want you to keep
as much of the money you've earned as possible, and get it as fast as
possible!

~~~
bnejad
You may want to make that clear somewhere on your website. I don't want to
click "Try Now" before I can see the terms/pricing/etc

~~~
tadmilbourn
Thanks! That's an oversight on our part. We'll make that more clear in the
next iteration of that page.

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ebahnx
I'm really excited to see Tiempo make waves. Time tracking has been a major
pain that hasn't been adequately solved for a long time, so it's good to see
some innovation here.

Any thoughts on integrating with other accounting software in the future, like
Xero?

~~~
tadmilbourn
Yes! We have an integration with QuickBooks Online already. Xero and
ZenPayroll are next on our list. Another commenter mentioned Wave, so maybe
we'll get to them before long.

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Pistos2
I read that page top to bottom, and was not motivated to switch from my
current provider (Freshbooks), with which I am quite satisfied. I consider
slowness of payment due to my clients, not my time tracking / invoicing tool.

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welder
I like [https://wakatime.com](https://wakatime.com) because it does the time
tracking for me automatically so I don't have to use a timer app.

~~~
tadmilbourn
That's the ideal! The problem with time tracking is that the hours don't get
captured in the first place. Automatic tracking greatly increases the
likelihood that the time is captured. We'll do more to automate in the future.
Our current focus on that front is integration with accounting systems as
those tend to be a costly part of the process to the business (either time
lost or money spent paying a bookkeeper).

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nathan_f77
Look forward to seeing your ZenPayroll integration!

~~~
tadmilbourn
Awesome! Make sure to click the "I want this!" button on the Settings page in
Tiempo. Then you'll be on our contact list as we further flesh out the
integration.

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akadruid1
Name is too similar to Tempo (tempoplugin.com)

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ultimatedelman
anyone else getting scrollbars distorting the page size when hovering over the
"advance" arrow on the right side?

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member345
yes, on Chromium/Xubuntu

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cheez
Do you guys have any kind of API?

~~~
tadmilbourn
Our API is not publicly available yet. Do you have any thoughts on what you'd
want to use it for?

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yarri
Integration with accounting software, like Wave[0]

[0] [http://docs.waveapps.io/index.html](http://docs.waveapps.io/index.html)

~~~
tadmilbourn
That's a great idea! We've already built an integration with QuickBooks
Online. And, we're working on integrations with Xero and ZenPayroll. We can
add Wave to the list.

