A Time Doctor Software Review- Understanding Time Tracking for Remote Employees

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many frontline businesses to arrange for their workforce to work remotely. And with it, came the need for a means to track and measure productivity in a virtual office. This is why time and productivity tracking software are being extensively reviewed, with one such being the Time Doctor software review.

Time Doctor is a time tracking software that enables businesses to analyze web usage and distribution of work hours across activities on company time. It not only ensures that individual employees stay accountable but also secures devices against unsafe websites and apps.   

In this article, we will take a deep dive into Time Doctor and explore its security, features,  compare pros and cons, and pricing.

1. 1. What is Time Doctor?
2. 2. Time Doctor Alternatives
3. 3. Time Doctor Rating
4. 4. A Review of Time Doctor's Features
   1. 4.1 Employee Monitoring
   2. 4.2 Attendance, Payroll and Time Tracking
   3. 4.3 Reports and Analytics
   4. 4.4 Alerts & Indicators
5. 5. Pros & Cons of Time Doctor
6. 6. Is Time Doctor safe to use at work?
7. 7. Time Doctor Pricing
8. 8. Sorry I was On Mute's Rating

1. What is Time Doctor?

Founded in 2012 by Liam Martin and Rob Rawson, Time Doctor is an intuitive SaaS (Software as a Service) tool for tracking overall employee efficiency. With multi-functional time-tracking software that is recommended by close to 300 customers including Ericsson and Verizon, let us see what it has to offer us.

Time Doctor displays detailed analytics of the time spent in the workday. It also monitors websites and applications visited during working hours and takes screenshots of the computer screen at regular/set intervals while at work. Time Doctor tracks the total time worked by every employee in your team also providing a breakdown of how much time each employee has spent on a specific project, client, or task. The analytics on the time spent on each task/website is very detailed.

In lay man’s terms, Time Doctor is a web-based solution devised for remote teams to provide insights, including time tracking, avoiding distractions, desktop work session monitoring, setting reminders, screenshot/recording, invoicing, reporting and staying productive even in remote jobs.

2. Time Doctor Alternatives:

The market today has many employee monitoring tools to choose from. Here is a handpicked list of Time Doctor alternatives, that have time tracking and employee monitoring features vary in pricing.

3. Time Doctor Rating:

In recent times, the market has become competitive with companies searching for features and unmatched capabilities. Despite the competition, Time Doctor has a rating of 4.4 out of 5 on G2, 4.5 out of 5 on  Capterra, and hundreds of reviews from various customers, thereby making it a user favorite tool and is a highly recommended product by many big companies.
That being said, there are scope for improvements and inclusions such as a better UI and better User engagement. Also, it only caters to the basic set reports, advance filtering option could be useful if added.

4. A Review of Time Doctor's Features

With the intention to make businesses much more efficient, Time Doctor has come up with these useful features. Let us understand them one by one. There are 5 main features to the Time Doctor tool, which we’ll dive into.

4.1. Employee Monitoring

Time Doctor is an all-in-one customizable tool that simplifies employee monitoring that's installed on your employee’s devices. It offers a single glance overview to check activity, engagement, and workflow across the company and track employee work on a real-time basis. Employee web summaries, web history, and app summaries are procured.

How does it benefit businesses?

It's useful in providing a dashboard overview of every team member's workday. Since you have insights into the work of the day at one glance, you can take necessary actions in advance and stay in control of your project’s progress. Plus there are optional features such as timer to let you know how much time is spent on each website.

What Sorry I was On Mute thinks

We liked the silent feature, it makes us forget about the app and continue as usual with our work. The interactive feature allows you to pause the timer in case you feel like- Chances are you may forget to resume it only to realize that the tracking is not done.

4.2. Attendance, Payroll & Time Tracking

An integrated app, that tracks time across projects and gives insights on the tasks that consume more time and create lags in the performance. Once the app is installed, it starts tracking on that device. Even the employee database seems sorted with a color separation marked for employees and contractors. The Client view feature is very useful in terms of inviting your client for transparent access to the work and billing processes.

It encompasses

1. Easy calendar management
2. Employee scheduling
3. Facilitates Overtime calculation
4. Time tracking
5. Payroll
6. Invoicing

How does it benefit businesses?

Accounting and Administrative activities form the main support structure of any business. Customizing and automating some of the repetitive approvals especially in a remote working environment can save a lot on manual verifications.

As tracking the time spent on each activity by every employee with the completion status can be difficult in larger organizations, this feature provides most of the necessary details.

What Sorry I was On Mute thinks

Invoicing and Payroll processing was faster as it synched well with our existing tools. Achieving accuracy in accounting processes gave us administrative freedom.

Since the tool captures everything, we were a little skeptical about the credit card details. But the password policy is unbeaten here! Also, the email which reminded us of the existing dues was useful.

4.3. Reports and Analytics

Reports and analytics for the basis of most meetings. Processing inputs for  payroll, billing, and invoicing come mainly from these reports. Linking and integrating into the existing tools was hassle-free with no data loss in the process.

How does it benefit businesses?

Builds in a trust factor with your client and shows and tracks the work completed in real-time. Also, the dashboard provides easy access to these features.

What Sorry I was On Mute thinks

Reporting format could be made better. I could share reports only in the set formats to my client. Further when the access was shared to the client, navigation across tabs was not user friendly. It gets overwhelming especially while handling multiple projects.

4.4 Alerts and Indicators

Signals that indicate an employee is deviating from his/her duties is especially important in a remote set up as this acts as a watchdog. Time Doctor’s Time Use alerts and Off track reminders shows both users and managers time is spent on each website or task. Subtle reminders are very useful when multitasking and the chances or missing out on the details are high.

Time Doctor makes use of Keystroke logging and takes random screenshots to track employee productivity. Though these are optional features.

How does it benefit businesses?

Customization on these alerts to support business goals can be helpful. This keeps a check on productivity and makes time tracking reliable in a remote job environment.

What Sorry I was On Mute thinks

Continuous pop ups can be annoying. Tracking activity even when offline feels useless. The webcam feature for monitoring feels invasive and alarming in many ways.

5. Pros & Cons of Time Doctor

While we were doing the Time Doctor software review, we had the chance to see its pros and cons up close. Some pros we observed were that Time Doctor

• Is a user-friendly and robust solution to manage ERP-related applications that is customizable. 
• Easily integrates with more than 60 apps including Asana, Citrix, Google, and Slack to facilitate administrative tasks.
•  Tracks  & analyze working hours to enhance productivity.
•  Provides a single user interface as all the tools are integrated into one window
• Provides a screencast picture of users so you can check what the end-user is doing.

Some disadvantages we found in this Time Doctor software review are

• The User Interface and the User experience is outdated  or old school
• Lag in the mobile apps in comparison to the web-based version.  
• Customer support is a bit inefficient and delayed in resolving snags.
• Keeps tracking even past work-hours so data privacy could be hit

Overall, we feel that Time Doctor is a useful tool on the desktop, but has scope for improvement in terms of user experience, mobile/smart phone adaptability and customer support. They should focus on improving the overall UI and make it more convenient to use.

We’ve covered a fair bit of ground in this TimeDoctor review, but one question still remains..

6. Is Time Doctor safe to use at work?

From tracking time spent on each website to storing credentials, digital invasion seems to be a questionable grey area. Also, data privacy policies are different across geographies and each one has an opinion about it.

That being said, we feel Time Doctor is safe for your project because the images sent to the servers are encrypted and the screenshots remain with the managers. Since all the screenshots remain with the managers or the decision-makers, privacy is maintained within the company.

Though the main idea is to ensure the employees are focused on their job during business hours, surveillance tools such as use of webcams and keystroke-logging is not a practice we recommend. It is a feature that businesses can use to secure the usage of office devices and monitor website activities.

Now, that we have shared our thoughts of using Time Doctor, let us look at their pricing plans.

7. Time Doctor Pricing

Time Doctor offers a 14-day free trial, following which are three different packages to choose from. These are the Basic, Standard and Premium plans. There is a slider function that starts from 1 and goes upto 50 users. All three plans' individual pricing changes according to how you move the slider. Our Workpuls review revealed it to be slightly less expensive than Time Doctor, with plans starting at $4 per employee per month. . Here is a deep insight into what it offers:

In terms of the number of users you're planning to onboard, Time Doctor is rigid in the features that unlock with your subscription. Premium users get more of an advantage with wide access to projects and activities. But you should be prepared to shell out more for the premium option given that it costs $20 for one user alone.

8. Sorry I was On Mute's Rating

Time Doctor has covered most parts of time tracking and productivity management.

Based on our recent experience in using and as a part of the Time Doctor software review process, here are our views.

The Sorry, I was On Mute team and I rate it an 8 on 10 on the ease of navigation and overall usability but a 7 on 10 on the interface and experience. That being said, we really wish to try and explore more options.

It was interesting writing this Time Doctor software review. The team and I will keep an eye out for enhanced capabilities and a better user interface in the future!