A few weeks ago we finally revealed we were working on it, 2 weeks ago we asked for your input, last week we talked about launching it, and today we deliver. Time tracking functionality is now live on all servers and is included with every plan - even if you’re on a free account.

Here’s how time-tracking works

At the bottom of every page, you’ll see something new - your status and time bar. This bar will not only take the place of the old “Update your status” button (which was on the top of every page on Goplan), it will also help you keep track of how much time you actually spend working on specific tasks. You start by clicking your status, and the UI guides you through either updating your status or tracking a task. You click it again to stop and start something else. It’s that easy.

Those are the very basics. We do some smart stuff under the hood too, though. If you’re viewing a specific task or ticket and click your status, Goplan will automatically suggest a task name and title and start tracking the time you are working on it. If you’re on the task list or the ticket list screens you can have the same behavior by clicking the new clock icons next to each task or ticket.

Reports, rates, time sheet cards

It wouldn’t make sense to just track time without having reporting tools, so we built those too. Goplan lets you setup hourly rates for each of your team members and generates time sheets based on this information. These time sheets give you and your team mates a good idea of where time and money are being spent in your projects. Time tracking reports are available from your project dashboard (check the new “Time tracking” item on the sidebar, next to Milestones).

At this point, we let you export time sheets in CSV so you can import them into your favorite app. We’re working on other clever ways to integrate Goplan with the existing tools for invoicing so keep an eye out for that (we’ll blog about that soon).

A few necessary remarks

You can’t expect to build the perfect solution for everyone, so we’re definitely looking for your feedback on how timetracking on Goplan 2 works and ways it can improve - we’re sure there’s lots. So go take the new functionality for a spin - we hope you like it!

As you may know if you’ve been following our recent posts, we’ve been working (first in secret, now not so much) on bringing Time Tracking into Goplan. And while we’ve kept moderately quiet about it until now, we have good news. Time Tracking on Goplan 2 is launching next monday, and more importantly, it’s going to be available on all our plans for no added cost.

We’ve been getting huge amounts of feedback since we first launched the new version of Goplan (for which we’re extremely grateful) and one of the most requested features has been Time Tracking. So we’re really excited about finally being able to say “it’s done, and it’s coming on monday”.

A few extra thoughts on features and updates

We’d like to make an extra comment about the way we’re managing Goplan’s development. We’re huge believers that you shouldn’t coast along once you get a number people using your application - something we often see other products do. As such, we have been keeping a backlog of feature requests and improvements that we’ve been tackling week after week (as we’ve mentioned before). We’re really proud of where Goplan is going, and we hope you are too. As always, we welcome your feedback and thoughts on the product or its features. If there’s a reason why we’re working on this product, that reason is you guys.

Time tracking. So essential for project managers and teams around the world that we get several emails a day asking us to implement it. And, as we announced two days ago, we are! Time tracking is coming to Goplan soon, but before we roll out the new functionality we want to make sure it makes sense for the majority of our users. So, we’re collecting feedback from people who typically track time in their projects, either in order to bill clients or just to keep tabs on what is happening and how long each thing takes.

Do you use an application for time tracking, or plain old paper sheets? If you use an application, is it online or a desktop app? Do you do track it in real-time, or create a report every day/week/month? Does your organization have one person who keeps tabs on how long someone takes to do something, or does each person do it for themselves?

We’d love to hear from you. If you have any thoughts or requests on time-tracking, please leave a comment, or send us an email to support at goplanapp.com. Thanks!

Note: Love those wallpapers? We do too! They’re the work of Mike Stimpson, who totally rocks at taking photos of toys. Check his Flickr set for high-resolution versions of these photos.

We’ve been working extensively on improving our existing functionality, and as promised last week, we’re pushing quite a few changes to Goplan today. Here’s what’s been changed (and make sure you check the very end of this post for what may be a pretty good surprise - itself coming very soon too):

Functionality updates

Milestones: The milestone functionality took quite a revamp. Milestones now have their own page where you can quickly have a glimpse of what needs to be accomplished in order for a project milestone to be hit. You can access milestones from the project dashboard (click the project name anywhere on the site or the Home button when inside a project, and Milestones will be right on the sidebar).

Task updates: Tasks are now colored when they have a due date. Green is for tasks who are still days away, yellow is for tasks under 3 days away, and red is for tasks where, well, you know. They’re in the “get me done right now” category. We’ve all been there, though, don’t worry. These changes are also reflected on your dashboard - if you have tasks assigned to you, they’ll be color-coded as well in order for you to know what’s really important.

Discussions: We completely revamped the discussion list and each discussion’s individual page. Although Goplan has a fluid layout (meaning that it is as wide as your browser), discussions typically involve large chunks of text, which means readability goes down if the text is too wide. So we fixed that by giving discussions (the text block) a fixed width, which should help you read through those paragraphs properly.

Company logo: We’re allowing companies to remove their existing logo (have you added yours, by the way? Login pages look 1000 times cooler with a company logo) if they added one by mistake. We missed this one when we launched Goplan 2 and it was about time we fixed that issue.

Comments by email: We heard you. We’ve been getting huge amounts of feedback about being able to reply to updates by email (which is great if you’re on the road), so whenever you get an email about an update, you’ll be able to reply back and your reply will be added to the comments list for the associated item (which can be a ticket, task, etc.)

Two other minor things: Added comment counts next to files and events on the calendar list view. We also changed the way we display names (we now show your user alias as well as your name) so we can do some really smart stuff with tags in the future. Keep an eye out.

“One more thing.”

Ah, we all love that moment in a keynote. You’ve been asking for weeks, and we’ve been secretly working on it. You know what we’re talking about: time tracking. We’re not spilling all the beans already, but here’s a quick hint of how awesome it’s going to be (because a picture is worth a thousand words):

Yes, thats a Lego Darth Vader - in a motorbike. So awesome (don’t miss the important piece of the picture, though). So yes - time tracking! It’s coming really soon. We’re just adding final touches and will have a lengthy post about time tracking on Goplan in the next few days. Keep an eye out! We’re so excited about this.