Your project at a glance—that’s what a convincing project report should be all about. Three years ago, we designed the now-former version of the project reports in mite. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve learned a great deal about which information is really relevant for a project. So much, that we decided to go back to start. And redesign the project reports from scratch.

Today, we’re extremely happy to lift the curtain, finally: here they are, meet your brand spanking new project reports!

Slimmed-down project header

We reduced the info shown in the header area rigorously. There are only a few key figures that are always worth your attention: the total hours, the total revenue plus the budget if there is one. Thus, the new project reports feature only those figures in the project header—period. Focus is what counts.

Activity graph

Below, the new project reports display an activity graph, a timeline of your project. The resolution of the bar chart adapts to the total duration of the project: each bar represents either a month, a calendar week or a day.

Hours & revenue per service or team member

The third area of the project report breaks down hours and revenue per service. mite shows the total for each service and its percentage. The color code should make it easy to spot A, B and C services at first glance, from an hourly perspective as well as a financial one.

You can switch this section from »Services« to »Team« to analyze hours and revenue per team member.

All time entries / unlocked / locked

On every project report, you might choose if all time entries should be analyzed, or unlocked ones only, or locked ones only. All areas of the report will adapt accordingly: the key figures in the header, the bar chart as well as the service / team section.

Removed: list of all single time entries

On the new project reports themselves, you won’t find a list of all single time entries any more. Instead, click on the total hours, on the total revenue or on the new button »Show time entries« in the sidebar to navigate to the tab »Reports => Time entries« which will be pre-filtered by project then.

In our opinion, this reduces complexity—which is always a good thing. Under the tab »Report => Time entries«, mighty tools to analyze and export time entries are available already. We’re convinced that an easily accessible link to this tab is far better than to dublicate all of those features on every single project report. Two, this change speeds things up a great deal: even big projects with several hundreds or thousands time entries now load in a snap.

Shared reports

The new project reports can still be shared; we redesigned those shared reports accordingly. There’s one new setting though: you can choose whether or not you’d like to include all single time entries on the shared report. If you activate this option, a slimmed-down version of »Reports => Time entries« will be displayed. Thus, you’re customer can filter, group, and sort the time entries of this report by himself. Also, he can export those time entries to Excel or as a .CSV file.

This setting is disabled by default. On those reports that were shared already, we disabled it, too. Please enable it yourself if you’d like to grant your customer this little extra transparency.

Some tech-stuff on the new charts

On the new project reports, we got rid of the old Flash charts. Thus, all charts can be viewed without a special browser plugin, and printed without a hassle. As a bonus point, we had another look at printing in general and improved this part of mite, too.

Feedback?

We do hope you find the new project reports useful! Please tell us if you stumble upon any bugs or if you have any feedback on how they’re working out for you. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!

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iPhone, Android and Palm Pre users have been enjoying the mobile version of mite for a pretty long while now. Today, it’s BlackBerry time, finally!

mite for mobiles, which is a version optimized for small displays, is now available on all BlackBerrys running the new operating system BlackBerry 6; by now, these are the following devices:

• BlackBerry Torch 9800
• BlackBerry Bold 9780
• BlackBerry Style 9670

To get mite for mobiles on your BlackBerry, you won’t have to install an app. Simply point the browser of your BlackBerry to your known login address – done. mite detects your device automatically and serves the simplified view, optimized for a fast mobile experience. With this mobile version, you can track your hours manually or with a timer. Time entries can be edited, deleted or moved to another date.

Please note: Today’s release is a so-called beta, which means that it’s a first approach, a test version. So please: if you stumple upon a bug, get in touch with a detailed description! Thanks to those details, we can find a bug much faster – and get rid of it. Thanks up front for supporting us!

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Is there a dedicated e-mail address for invoices in your company, or a dedicated person handling your accounting? If so, you can now specify this e-mail address within mite. We’ll send invoices directly to this address – no more forwarding! If you do not wish to specify an alternative address, invoices will still be sent to the owner of the account, this address is the default.

Please find the new feature under the tab »Account => Payment«, in the section »Billing address«. The owner of the account can change the e-mail address there. We hope this little update saves you some precious seconds, month by month!

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Now, you can sort your tables below the tabs »Report => Time entries« and »Report => Projects«. This new feature makes it really easy to keep an eye on your most time-consuming services, your top-selling customers et cetera.

The list of all time entries can be sorted by date, customer, project, service, user, note, hours or revenue, each in ascending or descending order; the list of all project reports can be sorted by last activity, project, customer, (used) budget, hours or revenue.

To sort a list, simply click on the column header by which you’d like to sort the list. To switch from ascending to descending sorting or vice versa, just click once more. We hope this small—but frequently requested—improvement helps!

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Fast input, powerful output – those two are the top priorities here at mite. We put the last months into improving the output section, so it was about time to have another go at the input section! Et voilà: today, we’re happy to introduce four updates that’ll–hopefully–smoothen your time tracking experience.

Weekly calendar: fast forward, fast backward

Mondays aren’t the most beloved days in general, but in mite, there used to be a reason for that: if you forgot to track your hours for last Friday, you had to expand the weekly calendar to a monthly one to switch to the last week.

Mondays got better! Now, thanks to two little arrows on the left-hand side and the right-hand side of the weekly calendar, it’s a no-brainer to skip to another week. Just click those arrows to fast forward or fast backward to the next week or the last one. Then, pick the day you want to track hours on with another click.

At a glance: which days did you track hours on already, and how many?

In the weekly calendar as well as in the monthly one, you can now easily distinguish between days with and days without hours. Days with hours are displayed in a paler blue. When hovering your mouse over a single day, the total of your hours on that day will be shown as well.

Expanded input field »Hours«

We enlarged the time input field to make time frames, sums or products fit in comfortably.

Backstage: rebuilding the whole scene in Ajax

Lightning-fast! That’s the advantage of our reconstruction in non-techie speak. From today on, your browser won’t have to load the whole page including the navigation and the footer anymore when you switch to another day. Instead, it’ll only load the part of the page which really changed, the content. This reduces latency.

Plus, this paved the way for some minor improvements that weren’t possible before. The monthly calendar can now stay expanded even when you switch to another day or another week; this can be handy when you want to add time entries to a multitude of days. The form to add a new time entry can now stay open and filled with data as well; this can save some precious time if you realize that you’re on the wrong day, after you began to add a time entry by typing in some details.

Thanks so much!

Today’s updates are inspired by your feedback. So many users got in touch to tell us about their ideas on how to improve mite. Thank you, and keep it coming, please! This is really super-helpful for us.

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Who? What? Why? How? Did you know that? and What should we do about that? Yolk—the team serving mite—was all question marks during the last few weeks. And those questions kept coming, and coming, and coming. Normally, we would have stopped that immediately and would have tried to be a little more productive. This time, those question marks felt just great. They told us that we were up to something.

Every single one of those questions was a result of the new dashboards and the new information it was digging out for us. And that is exactly what we are trying to achieve: mite should be presenting data you are actively looking for, yes of course, but it should do even better: mite should distill this data to inform you. mite should help you understand your working time in depth. And it should report facts and trends. Proactively.

So here we go: curtain up, ladies & gentlemen! Meet your new dashboards – redesigned from scratch:

Features at a glance

Your new dashboards (formerly called: overview reports) feature three areas:

1. Key figures:
   • Today’s hours
   • Current week’s hours
   • Current month’s hours
2. The last 4 weeks, the last 6 months, the last year:
   • Chart: hours per day, week or month
   • Chart: hours per service, project or customer
   • Trends: comparing your hours to the preceding time frame
3. Projects with budgets over 75 %

Hours versus revenue
You can switch your dashboard from a time perspective to a financial one. If you use the hourly rates within mite and if you’re browsing mite as a co-worker or an admin, mite will not only show you which customers, projects and services you’re working on for the lion’s share of your time, but also which ones are bringing in the biggest share of your revenue.

My dashboard, team dashboard, dashboards of your team members
Tracking your time in a team? If so, mite will also show every co-worker a team dashboard. If you’re an admin, you can also access the dashboard of every single team member.

Customization
mite remembers which information you’d like to see. So, if you choose the yearly view of the team once, mite will show you this view again as soon as you return to the dashboard.

Everything is connected
All parts of the new dashboards are linked with the underlying data. So if you want to explore what’s behind a peculiar spike in a chart, simply click on it: mite will show you the corresponding time entries.

Some tech-stuff on the new charts
We said good-bye to the old flash charts! On the new dashboards, we got rid of this technology, totally. Thus, all charts can be viewed without a special browser plugin. Plus, the bonus point: you can print charts, now.

Any feedback?
We do hope you find the new dashboards useful! Please tell us if you stumble upon any bugs or if you have any feedback on how they’re working out for you. Tadaa!

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Time entries with time frames are now supported by the mobile version of mite. On the iPhone / iPod touch and on smartphones running Android or Web OS, you can now not only specify the bare number of the hours you’ve been working, but also a time frame featuring a starting and ending time.

Hence, all input options known from her big sister, the standard desktop version, are now available on smartphones as well. If you’re looking for an overview of all supported input options, please head over here. We hope you like the update, all the best with time tracking to-go!

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For over a year now, you can not only specify the bare number of your working hours when adding a time entry, but also a time frame featuring a starting and ending time.

If you want to track this additional information, just enter a time frame in the »Hours« field. E.g., enter »8 to 10« or »8 10« if you worked from 8am to 10am. mite will calculate the 2 hours then and save the starting time as well as the ending time as a note, so you’ll be able to keep that information for later reference.

Today, we improved the handling of those time frames when you export reports from »Reports => Time entries« to Excel or as a .CSV. Now, starting and ending times get their very own colums. mite extracts those time frames from the column »Notes« to separate cells. We hope that this new handling simplifies the further processing of your data!

If no single time entry in your export file contains a time frame, nothing changes for you. mite will then automatically hide those new extra columns.

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Always on the go, from the office, to a business lunch, to a conference, to a meeting, to a client’s office? Why not leave your notebook at home, and track your working hours on the go? mite is mobilizing!

Until today, mite to-go was iPhone only. Since today, mite serves a handy, simplified version to a couple of other devices as well:

• smartphones running Android,
• the Palm Pre and
• all BlackBerry, Nokia smartphones etc. browsing mite on Opera Mobile.

You don’t have to download anything from an app store. Just start your based browser and point it to your familiar login address (http://yourteam.mite.de) – done. mite detects your device automatically and serves the simplified view, optimized for a fast mobile experience. With this mobile version, you can track your hours manually or with a timer. Time entries can be edited, deleted or moved to another date.

Please note: Today’s release is a so-called beta version, which means that it’s a first approach, a test version. Of course, we did check the little sister of mite on all emulators available, but we did not check it on every single mobile device on every single operating system. There are too much combinations – it’s a jungle, honestly. Thus, design and function won’t be running 100% smoothly on every smartphone, we’ll have to assume that.

And that is exactly why we’d love to ask for your help: please tell us if you stumble upon a bug! Get in touch by e-mail, leave a comment right here on the blog or send a tweet. Any medium is perfect, but please never forget to include some information about the mobile device you are using, your operating system as well as your browser. Thanks to those details, we can find a bug much faster – and get rid of it. A huge thanks up front for supporting us!

Update, June 24th: Thanks so much for your helpful feedback! We just pushed two updates based on your comments. One, you’ll now find a link in the footer of the standard browser version as well as the mobile version which lets you switch to your preferred version. Two, in the mobile version, we changed the icon to edit a time entry. Now, it’s the crayon you know from the standard version, we skipped the »>«. Hope you like it!

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If you have to specify in great detail what you’ve been working on, or if you’d simply like to structure your notes in a better way, today’s update is for you: the note of a time entry can now be multiline.

The first point that was important to us while crafting this improvement was to keep the input form tight. Adding a time entry should be possible in no time, that’s for sure, but furthermore, the form itself should reflect this rapidity visually. Therefore, we kept it streamlined: now, it’s a two-liner by default. When entering more text, the text area simply grows accordingly. When entering more than six lines, a scroll bar will appear.

The second point crucial to us was not to break the current workflow of many users: by hitting the Return key, you were able and you are still able to send the form, to add the time entry. To prevent collisions, we therefore taught mite to trigger a line break within the notes field as soon as somebody hits Shift+Return or Shift+Enter. We updated existing text areas, e.g. when adding or editing a new customer, project etc., accordingly. We do know that this solution is not a perfect one – we think it’s the best though. Please give yourself some time to adapt to this slightly modified behavior.

Along with this obvious update, the multiline notes, we released some minor enhancements as well, all dealing with adding time entries, such as:

• Hours first: The most important field of all, »Hours«, now holds the top position within the form as well. This improves the time tracking process if you navigate by keyboard. You can now tab through all attributes smoothly.
• Advanced arithmetic: More complex operations such as »2:15+0:30*1.5«, input in the field »Hours«, are now interpreted as well.

Thanks to all users who sent us feedback to push those updates forward! We hope they’ll help you – and all the other mite.users – track your times in a better way. Keep it coming, please, we love to learn from your experiences.

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