Thanks! This is a great article for what I'm trying to figure out.
One thing I see in a lot of these articles is general reference to the term 'freelancer'. This seems to lump programmers in with writers, designers, accountants, and anyone else who can work on a contract basis.
I wonder how many of the 1 million freelancer jobs posted on elance in 2012 were programmer jobs specifically?
This tool is more of a timesheet creator than an invoice creator or billing app. It uses your git history to create a timesheet (with guidance from the user to make sure all the hours are correct).
One possibility is you could use my tool to create a timesheet and then import that into Quickbooks. But the tool will also create a PDF invoice for you.
The tool has addressed a pain point for myself personally, but you're right - it may be too niche to be worth putting out there. My market is 'programmers who bill hourly and use git'. Maybe not that many people, and lots of those people might be happy with how they track time already.
Me too - I hate sending invoices. Is your time tracking tool of the clock in / clock out variety?
Also I'm curious - how do you collect payment? I usually only have one client at a time paying large sums so I ask for a check in the mail. All the online forms of collecting payment seem to take too much of a percentage.
It creates a timesheet based on your git history, and then creates an invoice from that. It guesses the number of hours you've worked an any given day, and also shows you your work for that day and allows you to correct the estimate.
It used to take me an hour to create an invoice - now it takes about a minute.
It's not a huge savings - but for those like me who dread creating invoices it makes me happy to get it done quicker.
Of course the tool is worthless unless you are a programmer checking all of your work into git. I'm trying to find out if this thing could be useful to people other than me.
Yeah, that's the tradeoff! I work freelance so that I can work part-time. I do Monday through Wednesday for my client. Thursday is my long bike ride day, and Friday is the day I write my own software. (And a lot of time on Sat/Sun as well.)
I've found that it's pretty easy to get clients to agree to this if they know & trust you (I always work with people that I know from my full-time career.)
Part of the reason I asked is that I work freelance, but all the other programmers that I know are full-time employees. So in my small world it seems like there are not that many of us.