Crisis Averted!

On the heels of the release of Basecamp's latest time tracking addition, I've modified the initial release of Basecamp Time Reporter to take advantage of the new feature.

The changes improve performance greatly. Now, instead of exporting and parsing each project's time report individually, Basecamp Time Reporter needs only a single pass over a single export, making it about 75% faster.

Download

Basecamp Time Reporter 0.2 (8KB)

I recently whipped up a little gem that allows for generating Basecamp time reports across ALL projects. You can also separate client (billable) projects from internal (non-billable) projects (screenshot).

Basecamp Time Reporter runs on your own websever. It's written in PHP and requires cURL be enabled. It's easy to install, and only requires minimal configuration. Instructions are included.

I've been using it for about 3 weeks now with anywhere from 20 to 30 active projects, and it has proven itself very useful. It saves me approximately 20 minutes daily, which adds up to just over 7 hours a month!

Try it on for size, and let me know what you think.

Download

Basecamp Time Reporter 0.1 (8KB)

Update: I've just received word from the Basecamp team that they will be launching native Basecamp functionality similar to Basecamp Time Reporter very soon. This is great news for Basecamp users everywhere. One of the most requested features has been to view time reports across all projects.

It also means Basecamp Time Reporter might see obsolescence nearly on the eve of its release.

Update #2: I just logged into Basecamp tonight to find the new Time tab on the Dashboard. It looks and works great, and is welcome addition indeed.

After using Basecamp Time Reporter for several weeks, however, I'm left wanting more. I want to view each project's hours as a subtotal. And though it's not necessarily a feature to categorize projects, I want to be able to distinguish time reports of billable projects from non-billable ones.

On the upside, now that Basecamp provides native time reports across all projects, there's no longer a need for Basecamp Time Reporter to export and parse each project's report individually...