Honest Review:

Timely

• Memory tracker
• Efficient and in-depth reporting
• Gorgeous user interface
• Presentable and engaging timeline view
• Responsive customer service

Timely has three tiers of paid plans with different feature sets designed for different needs. The higher users go, the better and richer features get. There’s also an optional add-on available. While there are no free plans, Timely offers discounts for students and a 14-day trial period that allows users to experience all its features for free.

Time to take a look at the plans and features that Timely has to offer!

Timely Starter Plan

The Timely Starter Plan is designed to help solopreneurs and micro businesses become more productive by billing for up to 20% more hours and streamlining timesheet generation. It can be used by a maximum of five users with up to 20 projects.

For a hefty $9 per user per month when billed annually or $11 per user per month when billed monthly, the Timely Starter Plan has automatic time tracking, AI timesheets, idle detection, location tracking, manual timer, bulk editing, weekly stats, automatic reminders, a project dashboard, billable rates, budgets, and tags. It also has snapshot reports, high-level reports, report exports, the ability to access log time for others, automations with Zapier access to the help center, and email support.

Timely Premium Plan

The Timely Premium Plan is intended for teams. It is designed to boost efficiency and cut on manual administrative tasks with more automations. It can be used by a maximum of 50 users for unlimited projects.

For a whopping $16 per user per month when billed annually or $20 per user per month when billed monthly, the Timely Premium Plan has all the features of the Starter Plan, plus budget milestones, anomalies and error detection, internal cost rates, required notes, teams, workspace capacity, team leads, and the ability to view entry history, plan time for others, and mark timesheets as billed. It also has API automations, sync integrations with ClickUp and QuickBooks Online, and in-app support.

Timely Unlimited Plan

The Timely Unlimited Plan is intended for larger companies and is designed for extra capacity management, planning, and scalable security. It can be used by more than 50 users for unlimited projects.

For an eye-watering $22 per user per month when billed annually or $26 per user per month when billed monthly, the Timely Unlimited Plan has all the features of the previous plans, plus logging nudge, multiple currencies, a people dashboard, individual capacity, company view, live reports, and branded reports. It also comes with unlimited training and communication with a success partner, unlimited API automations, and unlimited sync integrations with ClickUp and Azure AD.

Add-On

Timely has a Tasks add-on that is designed to help teams schedule shifts, assign tasks, and track progress against deliverable projects. This feature is helpful for granular control of progress, as it pinpoints key persons and defines timeframes for projects, especially those that require sensitive attention to time.

The Tasks add-on is available for any plan for as low as $5 per person.

Student Discounts

To avail of a student discount, interested student users must send a message to Timely Support detailing their intention to avail. They will be requested to provide a valid student ID and a valid student email address.

1. Automatic Time Tracking

Timely touts automatic time tracking as the solution to the cumbersome and repetitive start-and-stop timers usually available in the market. The idea is that it sits quietly and unobtrusively in the background of the device, silently gathering data about all activities that the employee accomplishes across the course of the day. At the end of the day, the employee is presented with a log of their activities that the software has recorded, and they can choose which to share with their managers in the timesheets, and which to delete in the interest of protecting their privacy.

I love the concern for employees that went into designing this product. Unlike similar software solutions that brandish employee empowerment as a hot buzzword without really meaning it (I’m looking at you, Time Doctor), the self-determined sharing of captured data facilitated by Timely’s unique timesheet generation process is truly empowering for employees, mindful and protective of their privacy, and lives up to the company’s anti-spyware stance.

But how does it work? Powered by AI, Timely eliminates the need for manually starting and ending tasks with start-and-stop timers by intuitively recognizing the programs, apps, websites, and documents used, opened, and visited by the employee throughout their workday and tracking time against the relevant projects or tasks to which those actions are connected. It also records idle time to ensure that businesses only pay for hours actually spent working. The location tracker records users’ GPS location to ensure that they are where they need to be when they need to be, and this is especially important for location-sensitive jobs.

This is especially helpful for workers whose jobs require them to jump from task to task every day, as it unburdens them of the responsibility and attendant risk of human error in ensuring that their manual timers are properly engaged for every single task switch. Timely’s AI-powered automatic time tracker allows them to focus on actual work instead, helping them achieve better productivity by eliminating disturbances to their momentum and saving a significant chunk of time previously devoted to fiddling with timers.

While this is a really good idea, AI can present some unreliability in tracking time correctly against the right tasks, as it may take some time to be trained according to the user’s unique workflow and circumstances. This may result in inaccurate timesheets that require more time to verify and edit, which is kind of counterintuitive and runs against the grain of Timely’s promised efficiency.

Coupled with the deficiencies of the mobile app in accurately recording time for certain activities, especially calls and meetings, the occasional unreliability of the AI-powered automatic time tracker poses a double-edged threat to both the employee and the company. These seemingly small slip-ups could lead to loss of worked time on the employee’s end, and legal headaches, inaccurate spending, unhealthy projects, and more for the business.

2. Powerful Project Management

Timely has a robust suite of project management features designed to equip businesses with sufficient information about how their projects are doing with the end goal of maximum profitability and timely delivery of quality output, pun fully intended. It boasts highly visual statistics that allow managers to transparently see where budgets and progress stand in real time. It’s intended to foster collaboration, track time and attendance, keep projects healthy, and have important analytics available on command so businesses can have a firmer grasp on how things are done.

The Timely Project Dashboard is where the main action can be seen. It contains all the essential information that administrators need to see about projects at a glance. The Status tab shows the total logged hours, and how much they cost, the total unbilled amount, budget spending details such as total budget, percentage spent, and remaining budget, a comparative graph contrasting actual worked hours against planned hours, and a list of individual users detailing their actual logged hours and money versus planned hours and money. The Budgets, Activities, Planning, and Hours tabs delve deeper into the details of the data presented on the Status tab, and the Reporting tab displays analytics with customizable time ranges.

To ensure that projects deliver optimum profits, it is important to define and anticipate how much it would take to get things done. Timely allows businesses to specify time and money budgets, customize billable rates for the hourly rates of specific users, set internal cost rates for individual users to compare against billable rates, and define which currencies are to be used for each project.

Projects are also organized with tags that allow users to tailor how they categorize their hours across projects. Things are kept neat and orderly with required tags and required notes containing specific information when logging hours, while the mark as billed feature prevents timesheets from being billed twice.

3. Comprehensive Team Management

To run and manage projects smoothly, a comprehensive suite of team management tools is required. Timely offers an arsenal of features geared towards making planning, scheduling, and collaboration proactive, more straightforward, and more time-efficient.

The People Dashboard is where administrators can see all the important information about individual employees’ capacities and workloads. On a highly visual graph, the dashboard displays the total weekly capacity of each team member, the total time logged and planned for a chosen period, and the remaining available hours left for that period. It also shows which employees have unaccounted time or missing hours that haven’t been logged in their timesheets, and those who log more hours than their daily capacity or go into overtime regularly.

Aside from the statistics display, the People Dashboard also allows administrators to send in-app or email notifications to ensure that important information reaches the people they’re intended for, individually or by group.

Speaking of groups, Timely makes compartmentalization easier with the Teams feature. Employees can be grouped for optimized collaboration on important project elements, and the Team Leads feature allows administrators to assign individual members as group leaders and project point persons without granting account-wide data access.

The Individual Capacity feature allows managers to keep an eye on and support teams with different weekly schedules, while the Workspace Capacity safeguards against burnout by showing total weekly hours which helps in distributing workload fairly and intelligently. The Plan Time for Others feature allows administrators to assign work and shifts to individuals after perusing Workspace Capacity, and the Log Time for Others allows them to ensure that members who put in the hours but forget to log them in aren’t marked absent.

The Tasks add-on is also a helpful feature that facilitates scheduling, progress tracking, attendance tracking, and task assignment, which is especially beneficial for projects that require a lot more fine-tuned control and devoted attention than usual.

(As of December 2023)

• Capterra: 4.6/5
• G2: 4.8/5
• Software Advice: 4.5/5
• TrustRadius: 8.8/10
• Google Play Store: 3.5/5
• App Store: 3.6/5

Timely is a very well-designed software that is intended to make work smart. It frees up a huge chunk of time and resources usually allocated to administrative tasks with automations and allows employees to focus on actual work by cutting out the timer-fiddling when switching between tasks and projects throughout the day with AI that records and categorizes every action and logs it against relevant projects or specific tasks quietly in the background. While the AI still needs a lot of improvement, I’m quite confident that it will grow and improve over time, just as it is designed to. It just sucks that it gets stuff wrong occasionally today, but that’s to be expected in learning models — they get better and “understand” how you work better as you use them.

Recognizing that tasks other than those that involve keyboard and mouse movement — such as calls, meetings, and other off-screen actions such as solving problems and plotting courses of action in one’s head — would be a step in the right direction for Timely. Making the mobile apps as robust as the desktop version would be another. And ensuring that no worked hours are lost or left unrecorded when doing off-screen tasks would help ensure that businesses can avoid ugly confrontations and expensive legal actions.

But more than the occasionally wonky AI, bugs, and glitching, what really irks me is the lack of an invoicing feature. I mean, what were the developers thinking? Designing something quite nice but leaving out an essential feature that would make the software a total solution is just a big NO in bold red letters for me. This oversight that forces users to jump between Timely and another third-party invoicing software is counterintuitive and distasteful.

But on to the silver lining: the Memory tracker is something I truly love. It’s a thoughtful and very smart touch that makes life easier for both employees and admins. And speaking of employees and their lives, I really appreciate that Timely really walks the talk when they say that they put employee privacy first. The Memory tracker records everything that a user does during the workday, that much is true — websites, apps, documents, everything — but at the end of the day, they still have the power to regulate which information makes it to their managers’ dashboard to review.

That being said, I’d say that Timely’s pros outweigh the cons, and if you think that their high price points are an investment worth splurging on, I’d say it’s timely to get Timely today.