Paymo – Review

Paymo is a cloud time tracking system that, in something of a novel extension, is soon to begin offering an invoicing system as an adjunct to time tracking. It nicely combines the time tracking and invoicing aspects of jobs and does so on a multi-language, multi-currency basis.

Their multi-language functionality is at the user level, meaning that different employees can use the system in their own language. Currently supported languages beyond English are Hungarian, Romanian, Slovakian, German, French, Russian, Chinese (regular and traditional).

In an important feature for time tracking, where every second counts, Paymo has enabled Google gears allowing offline use – it also has a desktop time tracking widget. Paymo costs $3.99 per user per month and this includes the invoicing functionality. Other pricing options are also available.

Time tracking offerings are a category that I’ve not had much to do with – in fact I’ve only reviewed one other stand alone time tracker previously. My review then is based on what I can glean from a quick once over, and also what strikes me at first glance of their usability.

Payme has a lovely UI full of web 2.0 goodness – it has the requisite dashboard with some nice graphs showing company performance and also offers up a quick view of recent projects, pending invoices and other must have information.

Drilling down into the client tab shows a rich screen with as much time and invoicing information as one would expect from this sort of application (after all it’s not an accounting app and so limits itself to invoices and time reports).

Having said that a glance at the reports tab shows that Paymo is serious about giving users a full range of reporting metrics. Users can generate reports that have granular control over projects, users, tasks and time entries – in fact users can slice and dice their reporting pretty much as far as they want.

As mentioned the invoice reporting is simple, as would be expected from this type of app. Users can get a quick glance of invoice totals, generation dates and status – any more and a quick trip to the accounting application is in order. Luckily on this count Paymo has one of the most cleanly documented APIs I’ve seen – in the very near future integration with a couple of accounting applications will be complete.

That said the Paymo invoice generation is pretty good and would probably suffice for most users without complex invoicing requirements.

All in all I was impressed by the Paymo offering. $4 a month is very little to spend on an application that should aid billable hours and ease the hassle involved in invoicing those hours. The fact that it’s multi-currency and multi-lingual is yet another string to the Paymo bow.