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Basecamp for time tracking, FreshBooks for invoicing

Basecamp is a great tool for managing projects, clients, and keeping track of time.

FreshBooks is a wonderful invoicing tool, offering smooth integration with Basecamp, online payment for your customers, and even snail mail for those times you need to mail an invoice the old-fashioned way. Using Authorize.net you can also set up recurring payments.

You can track time within Basecamp if you go with their Plus plan or higher, or you can track time in FreshBooks itself. If you use Basecamp, there are great extras such as  Project Recon for time tracking (with a timer). FreshBooks itself also offers stopwatch-style timers.

If you track your time in Basecamp, as I do, you can easily synchronize that with FreshBooks. In Basecamp you simply enter tasks in a to-do list and then log time by clicking on the little clock icon. You have to type in the time spent, i.e. “3.75″ or “3:45″. This is a slight nuisance, which can be alleviated by using Project Recon’s stopwatch approach.  I have noticed that the time log entries in Basecamp need to contain a meaningful description, which seems like extra work for  no good reason, when there’s already a to-do item that should contain descriptive text.

When adding time for a to-do, I don’t want to have to enter a Description. The Description should default to whatever the text for the To-do is. I am using Freshbooks, and if I simply import the time without adding a description to the time entry in Basecamp, the invoice line items in Freshbooks look like this:

[Some Project 05/18/10]

The Basecamp people (37signals) let me know they will take my suggestion into consideration, but until then the name of the game is to copy and paste the to-do text into the time log entry’s description … an unnecessary pain, I would think. I do hope they fix it.