What I'd really like to find is a timecard/time-reporting package that could sit on the corner of your desktop, help you track the billable time you're spending each day, help you then polish it into a reportable form, and then synchronize it all to a central server.

So, even with a company of 20 or 30 people scattered all over the planet, billable time could easily be collected (quite accurately), and managers at the central-office could easily keep track of things, especially around billing time.

Now, it seems to me that bezillions of companies are doing this ... billing for their time in just this way ... and somebody in the open-source world must be doing it really well. We've got Windows and Macintoshes and Linux and, what the heck, even iPhones and stuff.

Where do I look?

You could start by looking here: http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&q=...ng&btnG=Search

The link bigrigdriver posted is correct, but I did not follow the links to all the search results

I would strongly recommend that you look for a solution which allows you to use a web interface. Given the different platforms that you use and the various geographic locations that would be much easier than installing applications on each machine.

If you choose a normal application you end up in an eternal installation an maintenance cyclus as people get new computers or new software installations etc. For thes purposes I believe zero install and zero maintenance is a must.

I know there are lots of these applications based on MySQL and PHP available to be installed on a central server. You should be able to find them by adding PHP to your search key.

jlinkels

Google. Gosh darn it, why didn't I think of that?

I don't want "a web page," because for one thing, a web page relies upon voluntary entries. I want something that will sit on the desktop like that lawyer's proverbial clock, and that will keep a central server apprised of the time.

For any company that "sells time," time is literally money, and the small scraps of time that don't get accounted-for (or that do not get described in a "billable" way) add up to many thousands of dollars a month.

Let's say you're billed-out at a typical rate of $75/hr and you sorta remember what you did today but you forgot that 30 minutes that you spent addressing a "quick fix." (Well, you thought it was 30 minutes but it was really an hour and a half.) Now I've got several problems, all serious:

1. I do not have a billable justification for all the billable time that you spent. I'm losing money, and you're more of an expense to me yourself than you really are.
2. I cannot bill a client for more than $130 that he did spend.
3. I'm going to bill the wrong client for some of the time.
4. What have I got to go on, come bill-sending time? "Something sketchy." That's rope that I could be handing a client to hang-me with. That's a bill that might be diverted, perhaps for weeks, in somebody's inbasket "for investigation" instead of going straight to A/P.

Multiply this by 30 or 40 people in a rapidly-growing company and you've got a full-time occupation that should be done by software. Just to catch mistakes. And... how well do you actually remember what you were doing even "yesterday?" (Before that beer... )

And... that software should exist. Google will index it, sure, but I'm hoping that someone around here might have actual experiences to relate. You know... people who are in the business.

Check out Intervals. It's not open source, but it is free if managing just one project. It handles weekly timesheets, time tracking, and reports exactly as you have described. I'm one of the developers and we had the same issue as you. We needed to track billable time and we couldn't find any open source apps that would work.