Virtual Assistant Tools # 4: Hour Guard

To charge my client for my VA services, I use Hour Guard - a FREE Time Keeper software. It helps me monitor my time  and compute for my hourly rate and generate invoice for my client.

All of the things that I do are listed in Hour Guard including a category for major projects – this has subheadings for each project that I am working on. As I work through my list each day every time I move to a new task I set Hour Guard to monitor how I am doing.

The Hour Guard interface is very easy to understand. You have five menus and five toolbar buttons that are pretty self explanatory. New Task allows you to create a new task and set its parameters, while new entry brings sub-entries to an existing task. Other than that, the user can generate reports or tweak the program’s parameters.Usage is very easy as well. Click start when you begin working on a task, and stop when you’re done. The application will store it as a time sheet entry.

The reporting feature provides an accurate view of how you need to charge for your time, will individual task break-ups. Not only that, but also it can be combined with the invoice generation feature of the program, present under the HourGuard menu. Invoices are stored as XML files.