If you use Basecamp to track your project hours, you may want to read this article. I’ve discovered a fairly serious problem with the time tracking feature in Basecamp. I’ve also got just the program to make sure it never happens again.

I’ve been using Basecamp, a very useful project management tool, for a while, on various different projects at different jobs and with different freelance clients. The longest running project, being Key Ingredient. I work on Key Ingredient in 100 hour, pre-paid blocks, so it’s important that I track my hours to know when I’m meeting each 100 hour milestone. Easy, right? I’ll just create a report in Basecamp that shows all the hours for Erika Greco from August 2006 - May 2007. This spits out 256 hours, the oldest of which being Nov. 10th (even though I’ve got hours dating back to August). Hmm… I know I’ve been working a lot on KI lately, and I’ve got to be close to the 300 hour milestone. It should only take around a month for me to complete each 100 hour block. Yet, to my surprise, I’m still only at 256 hours.

This got me investigating. I checked the date on the email I had sent when I completed 200 hours and realised that I’ve been working on the current time block since March. So, I created another time report between March and Today and low and behold, I come up with 153 hours! Now, I’m faced with a serious problem. Not only have I completed my current 100 hour block, I’m 53 hours over. Lucky for me, my client, David, is a very understanding guy and after I explained the inherent Basecamp flaw, we worked it all out.

I immediately thought of a hundred other scenarios where this wouldn’t be ok, and someone would end up eating a lot of hours and losing a lot of money. What if you’re working on a freelance project and you’ve got X hours set aside for client revisions. Your client keeps asking for revisions, and you keep making them, carefully tracking your hours, only to find that you’ve completed X + 5 hours and they are only paying you for X. I’m not sure where the bottleneck in the Basecamp system is, all I know is for me, I couldn’t print out hours earlier than November 2006, though, they dated all the way back to August.

My solution? Tick. You can read my follow-up article on Tick, here.

(I’ve broken this up into two articles so that those who may just want to read about Tick, don’t have to sift through my Basecamp toils to get there.)

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