actiTIME Review – The Good and Bad for 2023

With businesses and teams becoming more remote and dispersed by the day, keeping track of things like billable and non-billable hours, employee leave, and the amount of time it takes to complete team projects can feel impossible. It’s just hard to do your own job while also staying in the know regarding who is working on what, for how long, and when.

Fortunately, actiTIME brings you the tools you need to monitor progress across all of your employees, clients, projects, and tasks—allowing you to gain trust, transparency, and accountability in your business.

actiTIME: The Good and the Bad

With a slightly archaic-looking dashboard, actiTIME could leave you skeptical when you first log in. But don’t let the aesthetic appearance fool you—a peek behind the dusty curtain reveals a plethora of tools to help you better track employee hours, projects, and tasks, so nothing gets left to chance.

It also has many powerful extensions, but you’ll have to give them a try to know if they work for you.

What actiTIME Is Good At

Time-tracking calendar and timesheets: As its name implies, accurate tracking of active time is essential to what actiTIME provides for businesses, managers, and HR teams. Its precise time tracking delivers multiple benefits that save money, build trust, and enable accountability across an organization. The company believes that workplace efficiency comes from cultivating time management skills.

By capturing exact hours worked via the web or mobile app, actiTIME generates accurate timesheets. This prevents billing under-estimations and ensures every hour invested gets properly invoiced to clients. Tracked time aligns with payroll as well, so employees and clients get predictably paid without guesswork.

For easy review and verification of all timesheets, actiTIME has a simple approval workflow. With a few clicks, completed timesheets can be submitted to managers for approval.. Managers can quickly approve valid hours and reject discrepancies to maintain oversight and build confidence that recorded hours match actual work completed. This seamless process minimizes time tracking overhead for all employees.

The ability for managers and HR teams to switch seamlessly between different team member timesheets facilitates efficiency and transparency. For example, everyone can see billable activity across the organization with actiTIME. This clarity around how time gets utilized breeds accountability within teams and drives productivity.

Easy individual tracking: actiTIME makes time tracking intuitive for employees through its Time-Track calendar and timesheet views.

The calendar view enables visual time blocking for each task, project, or activity via quick click-and-drag entries. Your employees will appreciate that they can easily schedule time segments on their calendars and drag blocks to reschedule as needed. Not only does this provide an efficient at-a-glance time mapping, but it’s also a fun way to visualize time spent on a job well done.

For manual entry, the timesheet view allows fast log-in of hours worked on specific tasks. By calculating totals automatically—including regular and overtime hours—actiTIME simplifies time logging and removes hassle.

For time off, employees can even indicate vacation, sick days, and other leave directly in the calendar. This consolidated form of scheduling means employees don’t have to juggle separate systems.

Between streamlined calendar blocking, integrated leave management, and one-click submissions, actiTIME simplifies time tracking so that overburdened employees can focus on execution rather than administrative housekeeping tasks.

Time-tracking browser extensions: actiTIME offers two Chrome extensions with the potential to be excellent for enhancing the time-tracking process.

First, the one-click timer provides a convenient stopwatch for tracking time spent on tasks. Depending on user preferences, some may find the extension to be a great integration, while others may think a separate extension is suboptimal compared to baking it into the main app. It all depends if the cross-platform syncing is smooth—which we’ll get back to a bit later.

Second, the Time Management Assistant can auto-track time spent across 24 default tools and browsers, plus custom added apps. For example, it can manage to log time spent in Notion, YouTube, and Gmail, along with many other productive or unproductive sites. This automated tracking of activity is useful, although the integration back into actiTIME timesheets is also a question mark that you’ll have to test out on your individual machine.

In theory, having a quick timer and a passive tracking tool can greatly improve the usability of actiTIME. These extensions showcase the potential to enhance time tracking with secondary usage metrics, but they just need to work flawlessly to be effective. For now, the implementations may feel a bit bolted on rather than fully integrated, so you’ll have to be the judge there.

Task dashboard: actiTIME’s task dashboard provides robust project management capabilities that enhance oversight and accountability. The intuitive sidebar structure lets you easily categorize all projects into folders, and the flow from customers to tasks keeps things logically organized.

In particular, the Kanban project pipeline view is a standout feature because of how it lets you drag-and-drop tasks through different stages—from statuses like new, planning, and in progress to in review, done, and won’t do.

The dashboard also has handy filters that allow you to filter by status, plus custom fields like priority, budget codes, and more. When adding new tasks, you can set estimates, deadlines, and billable statuses right upfront.

For managers, the dashboard fosters a comprehensive view across the entire portfolio pipeline in addition to individual tasks. This makes it easy to identify and readily address any stalled projects.

Similarly, employees can also utilize the dashboard’s clarity, easily logging time and adding comments as they please.

With project hierarchy, pipeline visibility, and built-in time tracking, actiTIME’s task dashboard gives businesses the clarity to meet deadlines, optimize workflows, and keep customers satisfied.

User dashboard: With an interface that provides an overview of all users along with their associated permissions and roles, actiTIME’s user dashboard centralizes the management of your entire team. Settings for managing time tracking and permissions for other accounts are easily configurable per user.

Adding new team members is as simple as creating a user profile, setting permissions, and sending an invite email.

Once a user is added, you can readily assign tasks for them to complete. These will synchronize with their personal workflows, so they can efficiently track updated projects and tasks, as well as time against assigned work.

The ability to edit user details, adjust permissions, delete accounts, and review usage analytics enables complete administrative oversight. Bulk uploading via CSV is also supported for larger teams.

Data and reporting: actiTIME provides robust data and reporting capabilities that create total visibility into time utilization, budgets, and productivity. The dashboard has useful widgets that display real-time snapshots of metrics like hours worked, approvals, leave taken, and more.

We appreciated the visual charts that illustrate allocation trends across projects, teams, and other parameters in clear formats like bars and pie graphs. You can generate charts for all sorts of variables, including working time, accrued PTO, and more.

For further insights, in-depth time and financial reports offer additional analysis with flexible filters to hone in on specific parameters, and you can also create reports with custom fields. Once you’re done, exports can be made in one-click to share findings.

To understand productivity, utilization, revenues, and costs at both a macro and micro level, actiTIME has an extensive analytics toolbox. If used well, you can use it to pinpoint inefficiencies while affirming your most profitable activities.

With real-time tracking, visual summaries, structured reports, and customization, actiTIME provides comprehensive and actionable data for improving your business workflows. .

Personalized configurations: actiTIME simplifies customizing and automating workflows through flexible settings and built-in automation capabilities. Toggling features on or off is easy and intuitive—a single click can adjust the interface and accessibility settings to match user needs and preferences. This lets you create an ideal workflow within the platform.

For streamlining financials, you can allow automations to assign billing rates to specific projects and tasks. actiTIME will automatically calculate total client invoices and budget consumption.

HR teams can configure rules for leave time accrual, PTO rates, overtime pay, and more. The system will apply these policies and handle payroll calculations automatically.

To connect with other essential business systems, actiTIME allows for certain integrations and API connections to enable synchronization with unique environments. This helps workflows remain constant across various tools.

Between personalized configurations, automations, and integrations, actiTIME removes friction from managing distributed teams and complex client projects. Managing workflows transforms from being a chore to becoming an optimized process.

Free trial comes with populated data: This one may come down to personal preferences, but many users will appreciate how actiTIME makes its free trial more beginner-friendly by pre-populating it with demo data rather than leaving it as an empty dashboard.

At the end of the day, this is just sample data that showcases how the software looks when fully populated, but having realistic content can make it easier to understand the ins and outs of the interface. You can still click around and modify sections like the calendar and timesheets while grasping the workflows.

While the pre-built structure helps new users visualize how actiTIME looks when actively managing real team projects and time tracking, you can always click a button to purge all the data for a clean start at any point.

Though a subtle detail, we liked actiTIME’s preconfigured trial because the dummy projects give a hands-on learning approach. It makes the workflows feel more tangible rather than conceptual, so you can imagine how the platform would perform for your business.

actiTIME’s Potential Drawbacks

Functionality gaps: actiTIME’s time-tracking capabilities fell short in a few key areas during our evaluation.

Specifically, we first found it a bit too restrictive that the calendar and timesheet views are limited to weekly time frames only. There’s no option to zoom into a daily view or to zoom out and see months at a glance. This fixed perspective can hinder planning and feel frustrating.

It’s also not possible to block out times for full projects or customers, meaning you can only log times at the individual task level. Having to itemize every single activity can seem unnecessary for certain businesses.

One understandable but still unfortunate aspect about the calendar is that it doesn’t allow you to schedule anything beyond the current day. That means that you can only log time for a single day…on a calendar.

Furthermore, you cannot even use the main calendar view to map out your week nor time-planned-per-project in the calendar. Not being able to map out plans for the upcoming week or longer makes proactive time management difficult.

Lastly, all time entry increments are also rounded to the nearest 15 minutes, which is not going to be enough for many users. For a dedicated time-tracking tool, the ability to capture precise start and end times to the exact minute is preferable, especially when small rounding errors can distort data.

Overall these limitations reduce the context and accuracy that make time tracking truly meaningful and actionable. Many users will be left wanting more.

Chrome extensions aren’t flawless: The aforementioned one-click quick timer extension provides helpful stopwatch functionality, but being disconnected from the main platform can put too much responsibility on the user to follow up with the extra steps to ensure everything is tracked. One false move or forgetting to stop the timer can cause you to log huge hours with no native way of knowing how long those periods truly were.

More importantly, however, syncing the measured durations back into actiTIME wasn’t perfectly reliable in our testing, so it leaves question marks how it will work for other users.

Similarly, the time management assistant extension aims to passively track time spent across different sites and applications, but in our testing we encountered grossly inaccurate totals—for example, a 3-minute YouTube video registered as 57 minutes of activity. This suggests that the extension can have trouble logging time when browsers have multiple tabs or windows open, and that can be problematic for many users.

The time management assistant extension also only worked for tracking time spent on web browsers, so any desktop work would not be tracked. Again, the handoff of this questionable data into actiTIME can feel more disconnected than unified.

The thinking behind these supplementary tracking tools is solid, but their implementations can create a fragmented, unreliable user experience.

UI isn’t the best: actiTIME’s user interface felt outdated and clunky during testing. The overall design aesthetic comes across as basic and visually unimpressive. The UI lacks the polish and responsiveness that users expect in modern software.

Many users have reported that navigation and workflows are often cumbersome rather than intuitive, and certain tasks make the platform feel more limiting than empowering.

For instance, just logging into the dashboard will leave a first impression of being outdated. Similarly, many customers have highlighted the counterintuitive interfaces and obstructed usability.

While visual design shortcomings don’t inherently undermine functionality, they can discourage employee adoption. Of course, prioritizing capabilities over aesthetics is understandable for certain tools, but in actiTIME’s case, the UI feels outdated relative to both contemporary expectations and the platform’s own potential.

actiTIME Plans and Pricing

actiTIME offers two different hosting plans: actiTIME Online and actiTIME Self-Hosted. While both plans offer the exact same feature set, actiTIME Self-Hosted lets you host the software on servers of your choice.

The self-hosted option has some other benefits as well. Namely, you have absolute control over your data and it’s a one-time payment. But, if you opt for the self-hosted plan, it doesn’t come with a free trial—although, you still have access to actiTIME’s 30-day free online trial to get a solid feel for the software.

For a useful but restricted introduction to the platform, actiTIME offers a free option that supports up to three users. This free option has limitations on features like overtime, approvals, APIs, and integrations.

actiTIME Online

For full capabilities, paid actiTIME Online plans are available with transparent per user pricing that gets bulk discounts at higher scales.

For smaller teams of one to 40 people, it costs $6 per user per month when billed annually, or $7 when paying month-to-month. This plan suits smaller businesses ready to unlock the complete feature set, since all of the paid plans come with full-feature access.

As companies scale to 41-200 users, the price drops to $5 or $6 per person per month when billed annually or monthly, respectively. This discounted rate rewards larger deployments with extra value.

Finally, heavy users above 200 employees pay a flat $1,250 per month for unlimited users when paying annually, or $1500 per month when paying month-to-month. Large corporations can use this plan to equip their entire organization while controlling costs.

Rather than obscuring fees, actiTIME’s transparent pricing lets you align to the optimal tier to fit your team size, needs, and budget. Its priority is to ensure companies of all sizes can receive the precise value and functionality that their unique situations demand.

actiTIME Self-Hosted

For smaller teams of one to 200 people, actiTIME’s Self-Hosted plan costs a one-time payment of $120 per user added. As your headcount grows, each additional employee requires the full per-user fee. This model fits small to medium-sized businesses.

Once companies surpass 200 users, a single one-time payment of $25,000 covers unlimited users from that point forward. This flat enterprise pricing is designed for large organizations with hundreds or even thousands of employees.

For companies that want to self-host for data sovereignty, privacy, and customization reasons, actiTIME’s Self-Hosted pricing plans make the capabilities accessible. Businesses can get robust time tracking tailored to their requirements without overpaying.

Final Thoughts

actiTIME is a solid option to cover your time-tracking needs, especially for distributed teams and project-based businesses that work with various clients.

By utilizing its interactive calendar, project management tools, and workflow automations, you can stay on top of all your productivity and oversight needs. And despite how the UI could probably benefit from modernization, it will still get the job done for all kinds of businesses.

For small to medium-sized teams that value smooth timesheet management with an easy onboarding for all sides involved, actiTIME is an adoption-friendly solution able to grow with evolving needs.