As we mentioned in our last post, Agent Toast now supports the Paymo Timer Tracking service!

This update is part of our Agent Toast development roadmap that includes support for many more time tracker and invoicing services.

Some of the additional changes with this release include:

More Intuitive Settings Pages

There’s nothing worse that being presented with a huge page of configurable options.

To alleviate this we’ve broken down the settings pages into manageable chunks.

1. Step 1 is where you specify your time tracker and invoicing services.
2. Step 2 is where you define your project-to-project mappings (see below).
3. Step 3 is where you configure how Agent Toast will handle your timeslip entries as they’re imported.

Our settings page walk you through your account setup without getting in the way.

You can either save your changes per page, or save them and progress to the next set of options.

In this way we reduce overwhelm for first timers and also move you to importing timeslips faster.

Changes To Project Mapping Direction

When you import a timeslip from Toggl/Paymo to FreeAgent, it is necessary to import from a project in one service, to a project in another.

To achieve this, we provide the ability to map projects from one service to another.

In this way, all time entries from 1 project will always be mapped to a specific project/client in the other.

However, the system was originally designed so that the project mapping was in the direction: invoicing service to timer service.

This was a little limiting as you couldn’t have more than 1 timer project mapped to the same invoicing service project.

We have resolved this by allowing you to choose which direction to specify the mapping.

Now you can decide whether to map projects from the timer service into the invoicing service, or the other way about.

Improved Interface Layout and Contextual Help

We see the interface to Agent Toast as fundamental to the usability of the system.

As such, for each release, we’re continually improving the layout, design and text throughout. The main changes you’ll see are:

• improved visual design of the timeslip import and undo tables
• you can now view your registered name and email address (as yet, no edit functionality)
• the settings page (see above) has been broken down into 3 stages
• improved inter-page jump links

We hope as always you enjoy using Agent Toast and it helps you with your productivity and billing management.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestion, please feel free to drop us an email from our contacts page.

Sign up for Agent Toast today using the form below!

Agent Toast now supports Paymo!

You can now import timeslip entries from the Paymo timer service to FreeAgent.

We’ve been hard at work here at Agent Toast to modify our Timer → Billing import service to support more timers and invoicing systems.

Agent Toast now supports Paymo, Toggl and FreeAgent

Our first beta release allowed you to import time entries from the popular Toggl timer service to FreeAgent and has proven extremely popular.

We know there’s a lot of demand out there for other products, but the hard part was engineering the system to support multiple services.

We hope in future, Agent Toast will grow to support as many of the popular online timer services as we can.

This release of Agent Toast sees several more usability and feature improvements, and they will be outlined in future articles.

Sign Up to import from Paymo to FreeAgent Today!

If you use Paymo (or Toggl) and FreeAgent for your billing and invoicing, please use the form below to sign-up to the free beta service and try it out.

A couple of days ago we released an update to Agent Toast which, while adding some functionality and underlying systemic improvements, came with some significant user interface improvements.

Agent Toast still performs imports from Toggl to FreeAgent as before, but with fewer bugs and a smoother, tighter interface.

This interface updates were outlined in the previous article in more detail.

Today, we’ve released a new video that demos the new interface and some of the latest features.

See the video link below to to watch the latest 5 minute demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWRB5lHva9c

We hope this demonstrates the clean interface in Agent Toast, and just some of the power you have with our Toggl to FreeAgent import tool.

Of course, Agent Toast is in beta and is currently free. If you’re interested, feel free to sign up using the form below or on the home page.

We make no secret of the fact that we love Twitter Bootstrap.

It increases speed of web development without compromising.

We even released a WordPress Twitter Bootstrap plugin to help with WordPress sites.

To find out more about the plugin, check our WordPress Plugin Page.

Improvements in the Agent Toast User Interface

In this latest release of Agent Toast Beta, we completely rewrote the foundation of the interface to take full advantage of the tools and styles available with Twitter Bootstrap.

The result is a smooth, clean, and professional interface that makes the tedious task of relating timeslips in your timer, such as Toggl, to your accounts and billing system (such as FreeAgent) that little more enjoyable.

Navigation now uses the Bootstrap menu and is far more intuitive helping you find what you need, fast.

See the screenshot below:

We have also improved a lot of text snippets to make it much clearer what certain buttons will do, and also added mouse-hover indicators on the import and undo-import page to give extra guidance where it might be required.

Improved text and interface addons reduce confusion

In previous versions there was a little bit of confusion when imports and undo-imports were being processed, so we put in a few dialogues to indicate when the system is working on something.

The image below illustrates an unobtrusive popover effect, courtesy of Twitter Bootstrap to indicate to you that the particulare Toggl timeslip may not be imported as-is unless combined with another.

This reduces confusion for failed timeslip imports for users.

In the coming days, I will report, in further detail on the actually improvements brought by the current release of Agent Toast, but if you want to jump and see what you’re missing, you can sign-up using the form below.

Currently we support Toggl to FreeAgent importing though we hope in the future to support many more services.

As always, we welcome your feedback on Agent Toast and appreciate everyone’s help so far

Before you can use Agent Toast, you’ll need to grab a hold of your Toggl API.

This simple little post is to show you how you can find the Toggl API key from your profile.

3 Steps to find your Toggl API Key

Here goes:

1. Log into your Toggl account from www.toggl.com
2. Click on ‘My Profile’ on the top right.
3. Scroll to the bottom of your My Profile page and at the bottom, you’ll find your API key.

Done!

Now you can add this Toggl API key to your Agent Toast account.

Not using Agent Toast to sync your timeslips quickly with FreeAgent?  Join today!

It’s that time again – yet more fixes and updates to Agent Toast Toggl to FreeAgent importer.

Combine Toggl Timeslips Per-Day

A user-requested feature that we feel made a lot of sense has recently landed on the Agent Toast public beta service.

Previously, we allowed for the ability to combine timeslips of exactly the same name (and project) in Toggl to be combined together into a single timeslip before being imported into FreeAgent.

This has proven popular with many users but has a few limitations – the most significant being that you have no granular control over which particular timeslips are combined.

We have now added the ability to combine timeslips of the same name (as before) and of the same calendar day.

It should be noted that Agent Toast will consider timeslips to be of the same calendar day based on the start time of the timeslip. End time, duration, and any other factors are not taken into considered.

Please check your timezone settings in Toggl to ensure it correctly reflects your situation as this is used to calculate the “same calendar day”.

To access this function, you’ll find it under the Settings page as seen below:

Multiple Delete Toggl Timeslips

The Toggl interface can be a little funky and often Toggl can present a challenge when you want to do some tasks in bulk.

We have now added the ability to delete timeslips from Toggl from within the Agent Toast interface.

Use this tool with caution, however, as you are directly affecting your Toggl data when you do this – this is the first time we’ve allowed for such actions whereas until now, no Toggl / FreeAgent was ever removed.

Some bug fixes to Agent Toast Toggl to FreeAgent import

2 important user-reported bug fixes that have been fixed are:

• When no organisation name is specified for a given contact, “forename” and “surname” of the contact are used.
• Some Javascript errors were preventing the import of timeslips on Google Chrome browser.

There have been many more fixes and improvements to the system other than these user-reported bugs, including some interface improvements.

How to access Agent Toast?

If you’ve already registered for the free Agent Toast beta program, to login to Agent Toast, you can do so directly from here.

If you haven’t yet registered, you may use the form below to sign-up for the free beta program.

We’ve been receiving some really fantastic feedback from our users that have helped squash numerous bugs in the system that have slipped under the radar until now.

Instead of releasing updates with functionality changes, we’ve been running the system as-is in order to reach a high degree of reliability. Currently, still, the only time tracking system supported is Toggl, and the billing system to which we interface is FreeAgent.

If you have any suggestions on what new features you’d like to see, please contact us.

We are encouraged by all the feedback we receive and request that you continue to offer it – it all helps bring about a rock solid application that we all trust to reliably interface our time tracking systems with our invoicing/billing.

Agent Toast visual interface refresh

There’s nothing worse than learning a new interface to an application when it’s clunky and difficult to navigate.

We hope with the new visual refresh that Agent Toast is intuitive and fast. We’ve kept it light-weight with a main menu and a sub-menu that allows us to extend upon existing functionality without clutter.

Lots of bugs fixed

To list everything that we’ve addressed since the last update would be tedious. We’re thankful that there hasn’t been any serious problems with data corruption – we’ve always taken extra care in this regard.

The most recent bug fix that was brought to our attention was in the time slip rounding functionality. If a time slip had a duration within which the rounding value fit perfectly, the system was adding an extra rounding unit to the total value of the timeslip.

For example: imagine that you round up to the nearest 15 minutes.  If you had a time slip of 1hr 1 minute, it would round up to 1hr and 15minutes.  But if your time slip was precisely 1hr, there should be no rounding – however the system was still rounding up to 1hr and 15minutes.

Moving out of beta development stage

As with everything, nothing lasts for ever. This includes beta development and all that comes free with it. We’re interested in keeping this service available to all that need it and we’re still working out a pricing model that we think is fair for all.

If you have any comments on how you think this service should be priced, we’re happy to hear from you as nothing has been decided yet.

Please feel free to contact us and let us know your thoughts.

If you haven’t signed-up for Agent Toast, you can do so today using the form below!

We’ve put together a quick 4 minute video outlining the basic steps involved when you have a new Agent Toast account.

The order of usage goes like this:

1. Enter your FreeAgent account details
2. Enter your Toggl account details (API key)
3. Assign a mapping from Toggl projects to FreeAgent projects
4. Import!

It’s really that easy. No more manually transferring your time slips from one to the other, just select on the relevant time slip entries and click ‘Import’.

And it’s all done for you.

Watch the video below to see me run through the process of setting up a brand new Agent Toast account.

If the video below doesn’t work, try the YouTube video here.

It’s that time again – more updates to Agent Toast!

Judging by the feedback we’ve had so far, this tool does precisely what it was made to do: save time transferring timeslips from your time tracking tool (Toggl) to your accounting software (FreeAgent) so you get paid more easily!

In the future, we hope to add other tools and services to the mix so there isn’t only one sync path, and thereby cater for users of other time tracker tools and accounting services.

For now though, we’ve been tightening up the service, squashing a few bugs here and there, and on the whole, making this tool rock solid – something to be proud of.

Below is a quick run through of the changes and fixes we’ve added that you’ll notice on the front-end. There are many more changes on the back-end that will help us improve this sync service in the future and these will be more obvious in later releases.

Updates, Changes and Improvements to Agent Toast

Finally, a ‘Select All’ option for imports

• Instead of having to manually select each timeslip, you can now ‘Select All’, or ‘none’ and import everything in one fell-swoop!
• Visual improvements and feedback such as highlighting rows, and even ‘click-able’ rows – you don’t have to click the check box itself.

Logged in as…

• For those people with multiple accounts for whatever reason, you now have a notice on the top right displaying the name under which you’re logged in
• Logout is now a nice shiny button you can’t miss

Bugs Squashed

• When the description for a Toggl time slip was blank, the import would fail. This is now fixed and the blank text is replaced with ‘No Description’
• Fixed a bug where time entries couldnt be imported if they were imported and undone previously.
• Fixed a bug where some entries weren’t tagged in Toggl in some cases, when they had been combined with others.

Agent Toast goes global

Agent Toast now supports a multi-lingual interface. Currently there is no implementation yet of any other language, but if you feel you would like to contribute to this project, we would be happy to hear from you. Since Toggl and FreeAgent are both used all around the world, we figured it didn’t make sense to stick only to English.

So, if you’d prefer to use Agent Toast in your own native language, please contact us and let us know and we’d be love to show you how this can be done – and we would of course appreciate your help.

As always, a huge thank you to everyone who has signed up so far and we hope you’re getting as much use out of it as we are – frankly we don’t know how we coped with the manual approach for so long.

If you haven’t signed up yet, grab your free account today using the form below.

We’ve been quite busy here working on Agent Toast addressing the feedback, questions and concerns from our early adopters.

We’d like to thank everyone who has taken the time to use the system to sync Toggl and FreeAgent, and then send feedback that will helps us trouble shoot the little problems that can occur in early-stage projects such as this.

Thank you!

In this post I’m going to outline some of the most significant changes to the Agent Toast with the aid of a couple of a screen shots.

Import Projects and Clients from FreeAgent

If you’ve never used Toggl, or perhaps you have had to create a new Toggl account and don’t want to have to grow through the painful process of replicating all your projects from FreeAgent, we’ve created a tool to do this automatically.

Not only will it replicate the projects in Toggl, but it will also optionally add the client too.  If this is successful, it will then automatically create the necessary mapping in Agent Toast between the (new) Toggl project and previously existing FreeAgent project.

To find this functionality, go to the Toggl menu at the top and look at the first section ‘Auto Create Projects’.

For each FreeAgent project that isn’t mapped to a Toggl project, you will have a drop-down box as shown in the image above. Consider the 2 options:

1. ‘Create both Client (Company) and Project in Toggl‘ – as you know with Toggl, each project can have a client assigned to it. This further distinguishes projects from each other meaning you can have 2 projects of identical names but assigned to disparate clients. With this selection, you create a Project-Client pair in Toggl, and map it to the corresponding Project-Company combination in FreeAgent
2. ‘Create only the Project in Toggl‘ – in this case only the project name in FreeAgent is used to create the project in Toggl. A client name is neither created nor assigned to the project in Toggl. Again, a mapping is made between the newly created project in Toggl, and the Project-Company combination in FreeAgent.

Separate Import and Undo pages

In order to reduce confusion for the user, and complexity for the development, we’ve separated the Import and Undo facilities. You can now find the undo facility from a sub-menu under the Dashboard menu item (as shown in the image below).

Several Bug Fixes

We’ve fixed a few bugs including:

• corruption of user account details upon password change in some cases.
• attempting to import time slips of Zero length and greater than 24hours fails (we prevent the import)
• sometimes the import function would result in a website time-out
• other minor system bugs.

If you’re experiencing any other problems not mentioned here, please feel free to contact us and let us know.