Time tracking in Excel: are there any alternatives to manage time and tasks?

The time tracking Excel-based solutions are quite popular today as this application (MS Excel) is a very widespread office tool, however, time tracking using Excel has a number of its disbenefits. It is based on capabilities of this tool such as flexibility: it enables you to collect and systematize your time-specified records (tasks, objectives, orders, etc) in a table that can be extended with any number of columns (to represent different attributes of your records) and sectioned (categorized) in a way suiting your business needs. Practice of Excel software prospers in small and medium organizations that don’t need expensive and complicated functionality of special project management programs, such as MS Project. Of course time tracking in Excel can work well for sole users, but when you would like to organize a multi-person job monitoring you can face certain issues.

Problems in MS Excel templates:

Even through a big number of freeware available on the Web (special add-ons extending project management functionality such as to-do lists, Calendars, WBS templates, etc), the basic functions of MS Excel are not well-developed enough for multi-user monitoring. Generally a time tracking Excel spreadsheet can be shared among several users via LAN using certain inbuilt capabilities (Shared Workbook); however this file sharing technology is outdated and fraught with some possible errors that can cause corruption of the file and losing of your business data. 

If you want to organize Excel time tracking in a better manner then you need to buy and install MS Exchange Server along with MS Sharepoint that drives Excel-based collaboration in a more improved way. However, besides these advanced IT-wise efforts, multi-user job monitoring also requires buying personal licenses for every user in your team. So while personal template is still a workable solution for an individual, turning MS Excel into groupware is quite an expensive and complicated endeavor yet (for small and medium businesses). That’s why multiuser time tracking in Excel is worth of seeking better alternatives to it. 

Alternative to multiuser time tracking in Excel for SME:

There is a good alternative to MS Excel as time/task/project management software – VIP Task Manager. This is database-driven software which provides you with three effective interface modes (Task List, Task Tree and Calendar) which can help you to concurrently share the same time-specified project information between multiple users, while having data reliably stored and operated on your corporate server (or any usual PC).