Keeping track of time is very important to lawyers and many other professionals, so I have been keeping track of the iPhone time tracking apps. I previously wrote about 17 such apps, then I wrote about an 18th app, and then I wrote about some online options you can use with your iPhone.
Even though there are already quite a few good time tracking apps, there is always room for another good one, and I found one. Adam McInnis of On-Core, Inc. recently wrote me to tell me about Time Master, an iPhone app that tracks time and expenses. Adam is not an attorney (although his brother is a partner at Akin Gump) and this app is not specifically written for use by attorneys, but it includes all of the key features that an attorney would want to track time on an iPhone.
The app stores a list of clients and projects for each client, and can optionally associate billing codes with a client and a project. You can also associate a billing rate with a client and project if you want. You can either manually tell the app how much time to bill on a project, or you can tap in the gray area on the time entry screen to start a timer. One nice feature that I don't remember seeing on other time tracking apps is the ability to bill in specific increments -- for example, you can tell the app to bill in 6 minute increments for .1 billing, and you can have the app automatically round up, down, or to the nearest such increment.
The app gives you the ability to have multiple timers at once, although this is, of course, useless for attorneys who ethically cannot bill two clients at the same time. (See ABA Formal Opinion 93-379.) If you have a timer running and then you exit the app, the timer continues to run, and a badge appears on the icon of the app to let you know how many timers are currently running. You have the ability to go back to a prior entry and adjust the time, which I consider an essential feature for when you go back to working on a project later in the same day or you need to fix a time entry because you let the timer run too long.
The app can easily prepare reports of your time and then you can e-mail the reports to yourself (or anyone else, such as your secretary). The app gives you lots of options to customize the report that you e-mail, such as identifying which fields to include and the order in which the fields should appear.
I haven't played around with the Expenses feature very much, but the app does give you the ability to track your expenses. I can see this being useful when you are on the road.
All in all, this is a very nice app. It includes all of the key features of an iPhone time tracking app and for this reason alone is one of the best, plus it adds a lot of customization features and polish. At $9.99, it is one of the more expensive time tracking apps, but that is a reasonable price considering all that you get with this app. To help you decide whether to buy this app (and to help you learn how to use it), the developer's website includes helpful videos of all of the major features.
If you are looking for a time tracking app for your iPhone, there were already several good options, but Time Master enters this crowded field as one of the best and it is definitely worth your consideration.