Do you work as a freelance designer or writer and charge by an hourly rate? The pay in my job for Inventive Software is set at a fixed amount per hour, and I need an easy way to keep track of how many hours I’ve worked, how much I’m owed for them, and at the end of the line, easily create and send an invoice to my boss.

OnTheJob was the light I found at the end of the tunnel after weeks of searching for a suitable application to complete the job I needed doing.

The user interface of the application is great, it’s very simple which is one reason I like it so much. It’s easy to look at, easy to use, and 5 minutes after installing it, I knew how to use all the features, it was that easy.

To create a new job, simply press the little “+� button in the sidebar and name your job. At this stage you can click the info button and set your default hourly rate, along with adding any other important notes in the provided space.

Then to create a task under the job, press the little “+� button on the right side of the margin, name it, and press the start button to start tracking your time. When you begin on another task under that job, create another task at the hit of a button.

In the application preferences you have the option of displaying the current time worked on a specific task on top of the dock icon. This is very useful and a nice addition to the feature set. Another wonderful small feature is “idle time deduction�.

If you leave your Mac to take a phone call and dont remember to stop the timer, when you arrive back and sit down, OnTheJob will pop up and ask if you would like to remove your idle time from the billing. It’s features like that which make this application so great, the simple, fine attention to detail that Stunt Software has done so well.

It’s perfect for those budding freelancers out there who are thinking, “There must be a better way…â€? There is, and thats OnTheJob.

One thing I’d love to see in future updates to the application is a Dashboard widget that allows you to quickly start, stop, and pause tasks - and something similar for the menu-bar. These would make it even easier to control the application and track your time.

OnTheJob costs $24.95 to purchase from Stunt Software. There is a free 30 day trial which let’s you use the application with all it’s features. Once the 30 days are up you need to pay to continue using it. Give it a try, you have nothing to lose.