Quarter.

The concept

Each day has 96 quarters of an hour. Each quarter can be associated with a project and an activity, each activity having a colour. The main view of Quarter is the timesheet for a single day, where the quarters are painted to illustrate time spent per activity.

Projects and activities are within close proximity of the timesheet, making it easy to switch between activities when registering time.

A weekly report can be generated, where the time registered for a week is summarised per day and per activity. This is useful for transcribing the hours to other systems.

There is no form for entering time. There is no timer. There are only 96 quarters, no more no less.

The look

Beyond the daily timesheet there are three more views. A monthly calendar for navigating to a specific day, a weekly report for when it is time to transcribe into whatever spreadsheet your client requires, and a way to manage the projects and activities you track time against.

The story

Quarter was born out of the frustration of having to use different time-reporting tools at different clients. As a consultant, I always have to keep track on how much time I spend on what. Often this needs to be tracked in both the consultancy agents time-reports as well as the client's time-reports.

So, I started Quarter as simple way to track my work in a separate system, and then at the end of the week I would enter the data into the different systems needed.

The system is designed to be simple to use, with a focus on registering time rather than extracting reports.

The years

Quarter started out as a simple web app to learn Clojure back in in 2012, since then I have been rewriting it in a number of different languages and frameworks. If you are interested, read the full story.

The community

Quarter is running on my small VPS, and I am not the only one using it. There are a few long-time users that have been with me throughout the rewrites, which I take as a sign that it brings some value - at least among consultants.

As long as there is free capacity on the server, anyone is welcome to register and start using it. The source code is available on GitHub if you would rather host it yourself.