Timely Reviews in 2023: Alternatives, Pricing, Reviews - SSR

Timely is a time tracking app, made with the belief that the best way to keep people productive is to place the responsibility of said productivity in their hands. They couple that with AI technology and solid customer service.

Timely is a time tracking application that believes the best way to get the best out of your employees is to place the responsibility of their productivity in their hands. This ethos is reflected in their non-intrusive tracking features. 

This, of course, does not work for everybody, but it is a cool aspect for organizations where creatives form the bulk of their workforce. As creativity can be stifled by undue pressure. 

Timely has a strict anti-surveillance policy which means it doesn't capture screenshots or monitor employee activities. As a matter of fact, the software was built to address this specific concern with remote teams.

Timely’s Use of AI for Time Tracking 

Timely is one of the few time tracking softwares in the market that uses artificial intelligence. For instance, the AI-powered technology automatically keeps track of time in the background while your employees work and simultaneously populates a timesheet with their timeline activity. 

Another interesting thing about Timely’s AI is that you can train it to recognize patterns in your work activity. 

Let’s say you are working on several apps for different projects during the day. Timely will record your timeline, which you can access from the memory icon on the dashboard. From this timeline, you will see a list of all the applications you used during your work day. You can select each application and link it to a project. By doing so, you are training the AI to recognize that app and automatically link to the corresponding project in future.

Timely’s Reporting Tools

You get four basic reports with Timely: 

• Project: This gives you information on your logged hours with the corresponding costs it took to execute the project. The time frame is set to monthly by default but you can change it to show any timeframe you want.
• Workspace: The Workspace report gives you a runthrough of all your workspace data (schedules, timeline, etc.).
• Unbilled hours: This shows you the unbilled time for each of your projects. 
• Employee hours: This report gives a breakdown of how your workers spent their time on projects and tasks, as well as per day, week, or month.

The platform also gives you the ability to create custom reports. These reports can be exported as XLSX, CSV, or PDF files.

Project Monitoring and Management with Timely

Timely allows you to monitor projects in real time. From the project's dashboard, administrators can quickly get an overview of the total logged time, the total budget, and the amount remaining on the budget. 

Within the tool, there’s a “People page” that is particularly useful for providing a high-level overview of employee hours. The visual color coding is great for grasping fluctuations in individual capacity. This visual color coding is a common theme on the software. Everything from tasks to projects, and schedules is color coded. It makes the interface easy on the eye and it is relatively easy to spot trends quickly.

The software can also generate invoices. The only issue with the invoicing capability is that it cannot be customized to include brand logos and it cannot be sent directly to your clients from the platform. You can, however, integrate with platforms like Quickbooks to streamline payments. 

Lastly, in early 2022, Timely announced the launch of their scheduling tool. This works together with virtual calendars to schedule meetings that work for every member of the team. This software— Dewo— uses artificial intelligence as well and is compatible with most Windows and Mac operating systems.

Grant Thornton, Nabler, PTS group, Stellaris, Retrospec

• Memory Tracker: Timely's AI automatically tracks time in the background so the user does not necessarily have to worry about whether or not they are recording billable and nonbillable hours. At the end of the day, the software will automatically have your timesheet prepared with accurate data on time spent working. Over time, the AI learns routines by tracking applications you use, websites you visit, documents you work on, etc., and associates them with tasks and projects for easy management. ‍
• Scheduling and calendar management: Timely excels at planning and scheduling. The software's clean interface perfectly arranges your tasks and projects so you can get a quick view of your day's and week's schedule at a quick glance. You can also connect to your Google Calendar, Gmail, and Office 365. Through AI technology, Timely will associate meetings, emails, and events to certain projects.

Timely also offers:

• Reporting 
• Project budgeting

Timely integrates with third-party calendar software (Google Calendar, iCal, etc.) and synchronizes your events with your timesheets. You can also train the AI to relate events or meetings with your projects. Whenever the meeting comes up next time, Timely will automatically log the time you spend in the meeting or event as a time entry for the project.

Timely also integrates with Asana, Jira, Quickbooks, Office 365, Zoom, Trello, and Zapier.

Lastly, Timely supports the following devices:

Windows 8 and above 

macOS High Sierra (10.13) and above

iOS 11 and above

Android 5.0 and above

All Timely price plans come with a 14-day free trial period. If you subscribe annually, you save up to 23%. The plans are as follows:

• Starter: This plan costs $10 per user per month.
• Premium: This plan costs $18 per user per month.
• Unlimited: This plan costs $26 per user per month.‍
• NUnlimited+: This plan allows you to tailor Timeley to your organization's needs.

Timely is a good choice for NGOs, freelancers, and small businesses looking to gain control of their time with minimum effort.

Mathias Mikkelsen launched the first iteration of Timely from his home apartment in Oslo. This was back in 2013 when there wasn’t much of a tech ecosystem in Norway. Mathias saw this problem and decided to move to the United States— Silicon Valley, precisely— with the aim of convincing just about anyone to buy into his idea. Through the friends and connections he made in a hacker house in Silicon Valley, he was able to raise $100,000 to further develop his application in 2013. By mid 2014, he released the second iteration and that was when Timely started to gain traction. 

Overtime, Timely grew and attracted investors. In May of 2016, they were able to raise a seed investment of $1 million from Norwegian venture capitalist group SNÖ Ventures in partnership with 500 Startups. In 2019, Timely rebranded to accommodate their expansion. Memory.ai is the parent company that now runs Timely and their recently launched scheduling tool - Dewo.