For years now I have developed timesheet systems.  From a desktop VB6 to a web based c# mvc app.  And each time I build it, it gets simpler and simpler.  It has to.  In this world you have 2 types of people.  One is the admin, the person that deals with spreadsheets and accounts on a daily basis, that loves to see columns of numbers adding up.  The second is the user.  They don’t care.  They don’t actually want to use timesheets because they see it as pointless!  So you have to build something where the user doesn’t need to think.

Cheap?

Over the years I have evaluated a few timesheet apps, and I want to share my experience of them, well it’s sad, but I love it.  Today I decided to check out a new one to me. http://www.replicon.com/ was the first one to come out a Google search, and its free for 30 days, however its quite expensive once you start to pay.  Its a per person per month pricing scheme…best case scenario for a large company of 2000+ staff is $432,000 per year – and your stuck with that for 2 years minimum!!  Seriously, thats a lot of money.  But at the smallest bottom of the line package for 1 person, it’s $108 a year, if you pay per month.  Which now that doesn’t sound so bad, quite reasonable actually.  And that would be a good price for the freelancer, so I decided to try the free demo.

Timesheets should be simple

Ok so the demo shows how MASSIVE this package is, and therefore the price tag becomes understandable…well ok no it doesn’t.  Am lost!  Seriously!  And its over complicated for a timesheet system.  I don’t want to go into it, but the time and attendance edition is shit.  Seriously, if I worked for a company that told me I had to map out my day in this way, I would quit (it wouldn’t be the first time).  Let’s move onto their other offering – project and billing edition.

As the first demo was a bit crap, am not holding out for this one.  But it surely couldn’t be any worse?  Worse…maybe…much more complicated…definitely.  I have clicked the option for the demo, to place some mock data in it, and this is maybe why I am seeing it as complicated.  There are columns that I wouldn’t expect to see in a timesheet application, and information that I wouldn’t care about until I was reporting on the data.  This led to investigate where these columns came from, because surely that cannot be default (why would I care that the work I did was in Texas?).  It turns out you can set up user defined columns and information.  And this is where I start to recoil at the size of the complexity involved in this system.

Comeback king

I recoiled for almost 14 hours from Replicon’s timesheet, and have come back with a clearer mind.  Let’s do this in a logical manner with each section that is available to me.  Those sections are Administration, Projects, Timesheets, Approvals, Reports and Integration.  Administration has 7 sub sections, and 25 sub sub sections in total. Projects has 3 sub sections, and 11 sub sub sections.  Timesheets has 3 sub sections, and 5 sub sub sections and a strange graph called “Utilization” which I believe is how many hours you have done this month.  In my personal opinion, I don’t think most users would care about that, most users just want to enter there time and get to the pub!  Approvals has 2 sub sections and 2 sub sub sections.  Reports is probably the largest and scariest section I have seen IN MY LIFE with 9 sub sections and with about 43 different reports – how many ways are there to say “Bob hasn’t filled in his timesheet for week x”?  A lot it seems.  Finally Integration has 3 sub sections and 5 sub sub sections.

Am not going into each of the sections as well that’s not my job here.  I just wanted to get an inital feel of how easy it is to use, and how quick I can get up and running and allow people to enter time.  For a freelance user, this is probably the most complicated piece of kit in the world.  For a large world wide organisation that requires to know how many shits a person does in a day, this is exactly what you need.

Not super!

So it’s not for a single user.  But as the user they created for me is a super dooper admin user, and probably why I have more options than a NASA spacecraft, I want to try a basic user.  I created one, logged in and as a single user you don’t really get to do much.  Everything is quite confusing as well, and what with the help buttons not working in any section for either of the user types that I have tested, then I would have to rely on going back to the videos on their site, or contact the company directly for help, or not filling in my timesheets for a whole month and get complained at by HR when they go to run reports!

Conclusions

So am stopping there.  Am confused as a super admin user, and am confused as a single solitary user.  This is software looks like it was designed in the 90s and not really updated much when it went web based…again in my opinion only.  It’s VERY complicated to use and VERY confusing in many parts.  Initial set up for most users would take so long, and so much training that it would take weeks to get working properly for a small office, and possible months for larger offices – and as its a pay per month this is where I can see the people at Replicon rubbing their hands together with dollar symbols in their eyes.

If I had to rate it out of 5, it would be 2 out of 5.  It has all the buttons and cogs and wheels that a discombobulator timemachine has, giving companies that are control freaks what they need.  However for the standard user and small offices this is not the way to go.  This is not a timesheet package, more of an HR package.