I have always been an advocate of trying to get the most out of tools that you are already using. Therefore, when it came time for me to need to track my time for billing, I wanted to use my calendar as the basis for entering billable time. For some time I had used Apple’s iCal for tracking time and I think it is a simple, elegant solution. However, with the new job also comes the need for mobility and thus the need for a Web-based calendar. For this reason, I chose Google Calendar.

The next step is to find billing software that will import my iCal feed from the Google Calendar and turn that into billable time. Upon searching, I found only one calendar system (I’m sure there are others), TimeLog, that would import iCal data. However, this is one of those instances where iCal is referring to the Apple calendar rather than the iCal (.ics) calendar specification. So here I am back where I started.

Fortunately, since Apple’s iCal naturally supports the iCal specification, I can import my calendars from Google into iCal and then into TimeLog. Now this doesn’t defeat my need for mobility as the only thing I use Apple iCal for is to import time for billing.

So here is the architecture.

1. First, I create a separate calendar in Google Calendar for each client. I can then enter a description of the billable time for clients on each respective calendar.

2. Subscribe to each individual Google client calendar through Apple’s iCal. Google provides private feeds for each of your calendars, so you don’t have to expose this information to the world just to get it syndicated to your computer.

3. In Apple’s Address Book, create a company for each one of your clients. This step has nothing to do with calendars, but TimeLog also integrates with Address Book and uses this information to build you client list.

4. In TimeLog, go to preferences and select which calendars from Apple’s iCal you want to track for billable time. Now all the events you had on these calendars will be imported as billable line items and can be associated with clients, projects, and categories.

The rest of TimeLog works as you would expect billing software to work. It allows you to enter billable time through simple entry forms as well as import data from tab-separated text and iBiz files. You can analyze and report on your data and also export it to a CSV if you want to get it into a spreadsheet or another program. I have been happy using it so far and I haven’t even explored all of its features yet.

I have one small complaint about this setup. Once I import billable time from iCal, I can’t edit the description of this billable time. This is less due to TimeLog as it is to the way that iCal is set up. When you use Apple’s iCal to subscribe to an external iCal feed, you are not able to edit those calendar items from iCal. They are read only. Therefore, TimeLog is also not able to edit those calendar items as they do not make a copy of them during import. This means that if you want to edit the entry, you have to go to the original source, which for me is the Google calendar. This is a minor drawback, and for those who use Apple’s iCal for their primary calendar, this isn’t even an issue. I’m interested to see how the new changes to iCal in Leopard affect this workflow, but I am not holding my breath on being able to edit events from iCal feeds.

Overall, I am happy with the workflow and the convenience of being able to just enter my time into one place, turning appointments into billable time. Now back to that billable time…