ClickTime Review – The Good and Bad for 2023

The times, they are a-changing, and so are work schedules. As a result, a lot of business owners are having trouble keeping a grip on how much time is spent by the team working, and also which projects and tasks are eating up most of the clock. 

Enter ClickTime. 

With its ability to monitor your employee timesheets, billable hours, and even who is working on what and when, ClickTime has all the features your business needs to stay on top of its time-tracking. 

And that is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg regarding what ClickTime is capable of—there’s a whole lot more below the surface.

ClickTime: The Good and the Bad

The deeper down you go, the more clever features you’ll find with ClickTime.

It has easy-access data templates for providing essential time-tracking information. It has automatic project-cost calculations based on the increasing or decreasing hourly rates of salaried employees as they work more or less. It even has the ability to view each employee’s current working “capacity” and performance.

And the best part? ClickTime does it all from a single platform. This has a lot of benefits.

For instance, being able to track each of your company’s projects from one dashboard gives you the control to pinpoint exactly how much each project costs, including both billable and non-billable hours, as well as outside expenses. It also keeps you informed on how long each project takes to complete, and how much future projects of similar metrics will cost in time and effort. 

But with all that power comes…an outdated, dusty-looking UI and some features that aren’t as intuitive as you might have hoped. The platform also has a lot of moving parts, so it may take a while to learn. Still, if you’re willing to put in the time, it may all be worth it. 

What ClickTime Is Good At

Employee tracking: ClickTime provides intricate employee tracking capabilities that give managers valuable visibility into team performance and availability.

The resource planning dashboard consolidates real-time data into a big-picture overview of operations, billable hours, and projects worked. Managers can easily monitor budgets and compare projected timelines versus actual hours worked per project. This aids in identifying timesheet and workflow optimization opportunities, and you can also feel safe from accidental overages because of automatic notifications that help keep your budgets on track. 

ClickTime dynamically calculates hourly costs into each project as employees log time. For salaried employees, this means higher hours will effectively lower the hourly rate. Either way, this not only reveals insights into your most and least cost-effective talent, but it also reveals the true cost of a given project with respect to a given employee’s time spent on that project.

Going beyond just time tracking, ClickTime’s employee performance dashboard incorporates detailed analytics on elements like intended budget versus actual costs, billable time utilization, expenses incurred, and total billings generated by each staffer. These employee tracking metrics highlight your star players as well as opportunities for improvement. This also lets you plan ahead if there are any changes to your team, because you’ll know what you’ll be missing if someone leaves. 

Tracking employees includes time off as well, and ClickTime can adapt to any of your PTO policy needs. Employees can easily request time off, which managers can quickly approve or deny. Accrued leave rolls over based on configurable caps and integrates seamlessly into timesheets for a unified view of the schedule.

By centralizing employee tracking in ClickTime, managers maintain precise oversight of team productivity, costs, schedules and more. The level of detail enables smarter planning, more optimized performance, and better workforce management.

Employee capacity: ClickTime provides impressive features to optimize employee capacity planning and workload allocation.

At the individual level, ClickTime factors in each staffer’s scheduled breaks, PTO, vacations, meetings, and any other personal time. This provides an accurate, real-time view into true employee bandwidth available for projects and assignments.

The system tracks capacity globally across weekly, monthly, and annual views. Managers can easily see their team’s total availability and allocate workloads accordingly. This prevents burnout and overburdening employees while still meeting operational needs. Employees also have transparency over their allocated hours via personal dashboards.

As hours are logged, ClickTime proactively reacts to configurable rules and policies to diminish employee hours as they approach overtime and their capacity limits. Alerts notify managers in advance so that unwanted OT can be prevented through timely workload adjustments. Preset overtime policies come standard, but they can always be customized.

By centralizing real-time employee capacity tracking and intelligent workload balancing, ClickTime empowers managers to optimize labor allocation and prevent burnout. This maximizes productivity both for individuals and teams over the long run.

Project tracking: ClickTime provides robust project tracking capabilities that enable businesses to gain a better sense of timelines and the true costs of certain initiatives. This prevents the common pitfall of underestimating project durations and expenses—aka the dreaded Planning Fallacy.

For timelines, ClickTime tracks both billable and non-billable hours spent across the entire project lifecycle—including managerial time spent solving issues, participating in meetings, general communications, and more. This reveals the true duration of projects.

On the financial side, ClickTime tracks all employee expenses related to a project from travel and purchases to hourly rates. Receipts are captured on-the-go, and expenses can be submitted in over 160 currencies with automatically negotiated rates.

With end-to-end time and expense tracking, ClickTime provides practical information regarding how much effort and budget is invested into each project. With more accuracy on performance data and trends, you’ll be able to make better decisions for similar projects in the future.

Keeping spending under control is important, and you can do that with ClickTime throughout a project’s duration by adding approval workflows. And, by quantifying and factoring in previously hidden costs like management overhead, you’ll have a more realistic picture of a given project’s required resources and expected costs from the start.

ClickTime’s comprehensive project tracking capabilities enable businesses to optimize initiatives by planning timelines and budgets with greater precision—preventing common and sometimes costly underestimations.

Real-time data, information, and updates: ClickTime delivers real-time tracking and updates across multiple data points involving time, project, and employee-related data.

As employees log hours on a newly launched project, ClickTime dynamically subtracts their pay rates from the overall budget. This allows admins to monitor spending in real-time and immediately respond to any budget overages.

One of the key tools you’ll find is the integrated stopwatch, which provides second-by-second tracking of time spent on tasks. This precise measurement helps motivate (or maybe intimidate) employees while providing accurate billing data, and there are automated reminders to ensure that you never forget to stop the timer.

Another benefit of real-time data syncing is how certain employee actions such as requests for PTO or expense submissions pop up instantly for manager review and approval, so there’s no need to waste time on other platforms to handle those.

Whether it be project budgets, detailed task tracking, or personnel availability, ClickTime provides ubiquitous real-time visibility. This access to live data gives managers a clear path towards better team performance and profitability.

Useful trend reporting: ClickTime enables more efficient planning by providing easy access to historical project and task data.

All past project details are stored within ClickTime, including timelines, budgets, resources allocated, and more. With this repository of institutional knowledge, managers can leverage learnings from prior initiatives to better estimate and plan future ones.

For example, ClickTime’s detailed historical data allows more accurately predicting the staffing needs, hours, required skill sets, and optimal budget when scoping a new project. Past billing rates and project costs can also improve the forecasts of expected profitability and ROI before work begins.

Since both costs and billable hours are tracked in ClickTime across all projects, managers gain data-driven insights to subtract expenditures and arrive at a metrics-based estimation of potential revenue. Future initiatives can then build on learnings from the past instead of starting from scratch each time.

Business intelligence and analytics: ClickTime provides a nifty business intelligence toolkit that’s great for conducting data analysis.

First, the dashboard centralizes all the real-time data points. Next, the business intelligence engine can be used to transform the data into insightful graphical reports with just a few clicks.

Pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs and more can be generated to visualize these trends, while scheduled report automation ensures key stakeholders are kept informed. The resulting data can also be exported effortlessly and in a variety of formats as needed.

ClickTime includes more than 70 pre-built report templates for common reporting needs that can provide instant value. In our experience, these covered most of the imaginable analysis scenarios we would want to run, with minimal customization needed.

Between simplified data views, real-time reporting, and plenty of pre-configured templates, ClickTime’s business intelligence toolkit is able to unlock key project data insights for making informed future decisions.

Customizability: ClickTime provides extensive customization capabilities to tailor the platform to your unique business needs.

For timesheets, you can create custom fields to track the specific data points that actually matter—with project, task, and hourly details included. The multi-tier object hierarchy allows capturing insights from the client level all the way down to individual time logs. If needed, you can also add personal notes on each entry to provide reminders and context.

Beyond data fields, the timesheets themselves can be customized and polished to match branding and look more professional. There’s even a Quick Time entry feature that enables fast copying of daily logs for repetitive schedules.

On the administrative side, setting the right permissions guarantees appropriate employee access while a powerful rules engine allows you to control company-wide workflow settings—from maximum hours to budget caps and more.

Whether tailoring data collection, timesheet design, permissions, or overarching rules, ClickTime is flexible enough to model your specific tracking needs, approval chains, and business logic.

Integrations: ClickTime provides extensive integrations with common business software across accounting, HR, communications, customer relations management, and more. This allows seamless data connectivity for automated workflows.

A major highlight is the ability to integrate accounting platforms like Xero, Sage Intacct, and Workday. This lets you transfer granular time and expense data from ClickTime directly into your financial systems for streamlined billing and reporting.

In addition to accounting, ClickTime offers integrations for tools like Slack, Salesforce, Asana, Dropbox, and many more. It also supports HR systems like ADP and BambooHR to facilitate smooth employee data transfer.

With ClickTime’s award-winning and powerful REST API, custom connections can be built with virtually any other business software without complexity. This provides the flexibility to fit your unique tech stack.

Overall, the big collection of pre-built integrations and API extensibility give ClickTime a strong direction to the tools your business relies on daily. 

ClickTime’s Potential Drawbacks

Requires a learning period: Like any advanced platform, ClickTime requires an initial learning period to get acquainted with its extensive suite of features.

With hundreds of capabilities across personal and company dashboards, mastering ClickTime’s vast functionality takes time. The employee interface is a bit more readily intuitive, but the manager-level administration tools involve a deeper learning curve.

While expansive, the system’s flexibility comes at a price of complexity.Properly configuring the plethora of options around rules, permissions, reports, tracking fields, and more is crucial but takes hours to optimize. 

As a result, users may be overwhelmed when navigating between the platform’s many views, feeling that they don’t have the technical expertise to utilize the powerful customization options out of the box. 

While ClickTime’s breadth enables modeling it to any use case, managers should expect and plan for a potentially rocky onboarding process. This extra time makes it hard to feel convinced of the platform’s full potential up front, since it takes time to see the value have any effect.

Time and scheduling issues: During our evaluation of ClickTime, we encountered some limitations around certain time and scheduling inputs that could benefit from enhancements.

When logging hours worked, the system only allows entering a total number of hours versus specifying a precise time frame such as 9am to 5pm. For teams with fluid daily schedules, this reduction of context could lead to confusion. 

Similarly, employees working on multiple projects per day may also experience disrupted productivity having to switch repeatedly between project entries rather than having a consolidated timesheet to capture all hours seamlessly.

Additionally, time increments are restricted to quarter hour blocks rather than supporting minute-by-minute precision. For a platform touting accuracy, we expected more granular tracking capabilities. Over time, consistently rounding to the nearest quarter hour could result in incremental inaccuracies regarding overtime calculations and leave accruals.

The daily timesheet view also caps entries at 24 hours total per day, regardless of the number of clients— so if you have three clients working a nine-hour day, you wouldn’t be able to input that in the daily timesheet as it exceeds the 24-hour cap. Larger teams may require creating separate sheets to log work across all employees versus having visibility into a consolidated view across the workforce.

Weekend work hours also cannot be captured, as timesheets only include Monday to Friday. This fails to account for weekend hours that some teams require.

While ClickTime delivers robust time tracking overall, enabling more customizable time entry formats, minute-level precision, and weekend coverage would improve accuracy while preventing the need for inefficient workarounds.

Antiquated UI: Upon first impression, ClickTime’s user interface may feel antiquated and outdated. The dashboard’s appearance resembles backend systems from decades past rather than the polished modern look that users expect in 2023.

For teams interacting with the platform daily, the lackluster visual design creates friction versus an enjoyable, engaging experience that contemporary UIs prioritize. Switching to this dashboard after using other modern applications will make some users feel like they’re traveling back in time.

Of course, functionality remains paramount at the end of the day, and ClickTime does a good job at delivering the capabilities it promises, but the dated visual design risks undermining the user experience and therefore productivity in the modern age of consumerized business software.

For administrators less concerned with sleek and progressive presentation, this may not be an obstacle. But for certain audiences, the UI could be enough to turn them off from considering the platform altogether.

Mobile app issues: During testing, we encountered some hiccups surrounding the functionality of ClickTime’s mobile app.

Despite availability being advertised for both iOS and Android, we were unable to download the Android app on several devices. Compatibility appears to depend on specific phone models, so you’ll have to verify mobile access across your entire workforce’s hardware if adopting the platform.

Furthermore, those who are able to install the app may note unintuitive navigation and difficulty in performing key actions like time entry. The complexity of the web dashboard does not translate well to mobile experiences.

In particular, the process of inputting data via the mobile app can be frustrating and cumbersome. The design is not terribly responsive, and the desktop-centric interface can feel overloaded on the smaller screens.

For teams requiring on-the-go access, the mobile experience may hurt productivity more than it enables it. The execution leaves room for improvement on both functionality and device support, and that can force users to abandon the mobile app altogether in favor of the more reliable desktop version.

ClickTime Plans and Pricing

From small companies and teams looking for basic time, expense, and report tracking to larger organizations looking for custom tracking, budgeting, and resource optimization, ClickTime can handle the needs of any sized business. 

It has four straightforward plans:

• Starter
• Team
• Premier
• Enterprise

Each plan builds upon the previous one, adding more benefits and features. When you move from the Starter plan to the Team plan, you gain access to additional reporting features and integrations. 

When you upgrade to the Premier plan, you’ll have all of the resource management tools that ClickTime has to offer, including the budgeting and forecasting features. 

Lastly, the Enterprise plan is for the largest organizations needing a custom solution on top of what the Premier plan offers. 

Keep in mind that there’s a 14-day free trial waiting for you when you are ready, no credit card required. 

Starter Plan

ClickTime’s Starter plan is for smaller companies focused on streamlined time and expense tracking. It costs $10 per user per month when billed annually, and it comes with essential capabilities like timesheet generation, a stopwatch timer for precision tracking, and email reminders for unfinished logs. You also gain access to over 70 pre-configured reporting templates so you can quickly glean insights from timesheet data without building custom reports.

To simplify time logging, the Starter plan provides automation of repeated activities, one-click copying of previous entries, and timesheet shortcuts. Full expense tracking is available as an add-on that includes approvals and reporting for an extra $2 per user monthly.

While advanced functionality like budgeting, scheduling, and custom fields are not included, the Starter plan focuses on providing fundamental time and expense management tools for small teams looking to go beyond manual processes. With phone and email support plus three years of historical data access, it delivers core ClickTime capabilities in an easy-to-use package. 

It also includes standard security protections and uptime guarantees so you’ll always have peace of mind.

Team Plan

ClickTime’s popular Team plan is available for a per-user price of $13 per month when billed annually, adding more advanced features to the platform’s core time and expense tracking abilities.

Building on the Starter plan, you gain custom time tracking fields for tailored data collection along with overtime tracking, employee performance reporting, and a custom report builder.

Additional integrations can be enabled in the Team plan, including Zapier and ClickTime’s REST API for connecting to other apps. Admin controls are also expanded with timesheet approvals, custom alerts and messaging, and team segmentation.

The Team plan also unlocks the following features: 

• PTO tracking
• Time off requests and approvals
• Accruals
• A company calendar
• Extended onboarding and admin training
• Historical data access up to five years

While still focused on fundamentals rather than project management complexity, the Team plan enables more advanced tracking, insights, and configuration to suit growing businesses. For additional flexibility beyond basic time and expense needs, it strikes a balance between simplicity and deeper capabilities.

Premier Plan

ClickTime’s Premier plan enables advanced budgeting, forecasting, resource management, and project administration capabilities. It costs $24 per user per month when billed annually.

The Premier plan has all the features of the Team plan, plus real-time visibility into employee availability, project performance dashboards, and data-driven forecasts.

You also gain access to the following resource management tools and features: 

• A real-time allocation dashboard
• Monthly retainer management
• Employee utilization goals
• Capacity estimates and planning
• Understaffing/overstaffing indicators
• Company-wide utilization reporting
• Month-over-month analytics
• Project management approvals, assignments, templates, and Gantt charts. 
• Seven years of historical data

For professional services firms and project-driven teams, the Premier plan’s advanced budgeting, resource optimization, and project administration capabilities power strategic decision-making. It’s the full package of what ClickTime can do for your business. 

Enterprise Plan

ClickTime’s Enterprise plan offers maximum capabilities and customizations for large, complex organizations. Since pricing is customized based on your needs, it requires contacting ClickTime sales for a personalized quote.

Building on the Premier plan, Enterprise unlocks additional advanced functionality like highly adaptable project hierarchy modeling to fit your structure and processes. You also gain the ability to fully customize branding and platform aesthetics. For data continuity, bulk historical time data can also be imported with up to 10 years of enabled access.

The Enterprise plan also supports single sign-on integrations, and an identity management feature for secure scaling across large workforces. Additional perks include advanced audit trailing, DCAA compliance controls, and customizable sub-job workflows.

To ensure ongoing optimization, the Enterprise plan has dedicated account management with personalized training and service. For sprawling enterprises with thousands of employees and intricately structured projects, ClickTime’s Enterprise plan provides deep platform control.

If standardized plans can’t accommodate your organization’s complexity and scale, the Enterprise tier introduces true customizability for ClickTime to meet unique business demands.

Final Thoughts

Organizations of any size who need to bring an array of time-tracking features under one roof can find what they need with ClickTime. Individual consultants, service firms, agencies, and distributed teams could all benefit from this flexible and scalable workforce-optimization platform. 

Although the outdated user interface could probably use a makeover, ClickTime’s powerful features, customization options, and integration capabilities make it adaptable for most professional services teams.

As the workforce continues to expand and evolve, tracking software like ClickTime becomes more relevant and necessary. We were sold on its abilities to track the intricacies of billable and non-billable hours, as well as how it can report “true” project costs and individual worker capacities. Maybe you’ll find a feature that sways you as well.