Product Reviews

Project planning and time billing are two chores that wallow near the bottom of most freelancers' favourite activities. Oranged Software's Studiometry brings both tasks together to make your work life less chaotic.

This project planning, time-billing and invoicing application works in a logical fashion. To track your work, you first add clients, either from scratch or by importing from Address Book, then create projects assigned to them, to track work done.

Studiometry's unprepossessing main window lists both clients and projects together in a pane on the left. When you select one, related information appears in the right-hand pane. The available detail is impressive, with data on planning notes, project settings - including how the client is billed - and a ready view of client payments.

Projects can be categorised and allocated a status, ranging from Quote to Completed. Both clients and projects can also be colour-coded to distinguish them in lists. Handily, you're able to combine these settings, so as well as setting colours manually, a project can change colour depending on its status. If its status is On Hold, for example, it can be flagged in red.

Tracking time and expenses is simple, although the terminology used is awkward, with all work for a client labelled, confusingly, Debt/Credits. To track time, you click on the open Running Timers window, assign a project and rate to start recording.

The toolbar also sports a calendar, to-do list and an invoice tracker. There are some ungainly elements here: when you select any of these items it appears in a new window with fixed minimum widths - this makes windows difficult to view together on screen.

To-dos

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can also be assigned to clients or projects - a nice touch is the ability to enter a new to-do by clicking on an icon next to a project. You can also convert assigned todos to debt/credits, so they can be included on invoices. The calendar shows both to-dos and projects with a due date.

Studiometry's invoicing technique is simple, but effective. Un-invoiced debt/credits attached to the project are automatically gathered and totalled on the invoice. Although Studiometry doesn't offer built-in support for VAT, it's easy to set up and can be disabled on a per-project basis. Similarly, although the program defaults to showing currency in dollars, you can easily change this in its preferences. Invoices can be customised through a built-in template editor that can optionally generate files as HTML, XML or plain text. A similar engine lies behind its reporting functions, which use pre-built templates to create contracts.

Although Studiometry is cross-platform, it is surprisingly well tuned to Mac OS X. Each Studiometry client can include one or more contacts and these can be synced to and - optionally - from Address Book.

The program also syncs with iCal, optionally adding to-dos, invoice due dates and project deadlines in its own calendar to iCal. Unlike contacts, however, calendar syncing is one-way: you can't add to-dos in iCal and expect to see in Studiometry.

Compared to similar time-tracking applications, Studiometry has a couple of powerful selling points. First, it supports multiple users, and this is remarkably easy to set up in the program's preferences. We were also impressed by Studiometry's security settings - including password and encryption support - and the fact that it also creates backups of your data as you go.

Studiometry is at its weakest with the supplied documentation - its help file is comprehensive, but poorly written. Confusing terminology elsewhere might also lead some to wrongly presume that it is a full accounting application. It does, however, link very well with Oranged Software's budget Accounted application.

Measured on its own terms, however, Studiometry is a polished way to track projects. It's speedy, intuitive and although it's had a price rise, it's still inexpensive compared to its competitors.