Today, we’re proud to announce the official launch of PaymoPlus, our Paymo client for Windows and Mac OS X. PaymoPlus is free to all users – including those on the free plan.

One of the greatest problems people encounter when they try and get into time tracking is the need to stop and start the timer to switch between projects. Some people find it adds too much work to their day, and others just don’t remember to maintain the timer between tasks. With PaymoPlus, we’re introducing new technology that changes that.

PaymoPlus tracks your time for you automatically. At the end of the day, you can see exactly how much time you spent doing what at a glance. PaymoPlus accomplishes this by recording not just which application you’re using, but the file or browser tab as well, ensuring detailed, incredibly granular information is recorded so that you don’t miss out on getting paid for a single minute of client time.

At the end of the day, you can simply drag and drop your tracked time into the right project baskets. Or you can automate the process even further by using the fantastic PaymoPlus rule filtering system, which allows you to tell the app which files or apps to associate with which projects. If you’re spending big chunks of time in a specific Photoshop file for that big redesign, you don’t have to worry about constantly sorting your time, for example.

Just as with our widgets, PaymoPlus allows you to use Paymo’s time tracking technology whether you’re online or offline. As long as PaymoPlus is open and recording it will save time even if you’re offline. Next time you go online you will be able to sync everything up.

We work hard to give users an option for every scenario. PaymoPlus joins a line of tools that make time tracking easy in any situation, including desktop widgets for Windows and Mac OS X, browser add-ons for Firefox, and Safari, and mobile applications. Paymo also features integration with Google Apps, Basecamp, KashFlow, Xero and QuickBooks.

PaymoPlus will work for both free and premium Paymo users, and can be downloaded here.

Recently, Intuit announced that it would be closing down the QuickBooks Time Tracker service for good on the 1st of December, 2011. For many Paymo users, this won’t be a problem, as tight integration between time tracking and invoicing is baked right in to our service. But for countless businesses, come December, their accounts will be stuck in QuickBooks while their time tracking service of choice is shut down.

That’s why we’re announcing the launch of QuickBooks integration in Paymo. Starting now, you can import and export information between Paymo and QuickBooks. For many of you who use QuickBooks already, this will be insanely useful — no more manually moving data back and forth. For many businesses, this is the perfect opportunity to fire up a free account, start tracking time, and get it all into QuickBooks where your accounts already are.

“We’re here to help all QuickBooks customers who are disappointed by Intuit’s decision to drop support for their time tracking apps. Since time tracking is at the core of many businesses, we understand the necessity of a fast and smooth transition to a new system. That’s why we created a simple solution that will get you back to work in no time,” said Jan Lukacs, Paymo’s CEO.

Here’s what you can do with Paymo’s QuickBooks integration:

• Export clients, projects, task lists, tasks, users and time entries from Paymo to QuickBooks.
• Import clients, projects, task lists, tasks and invoices from QuickBooks to Paymo.

QuickBooks Time Tracking integration is available to all users, on all plans including the free tier, right now. To turn the feature on, simply log in to your control panel, go to Company Settings, and then to the Integrations section. QuickBooks integration currently has a Beta label on it and as such we encourage users to provide feedback and let us know about any problems you may encounter.

The Paymo servers will undergo scheduled maintenance on Sunday 6th November 2011. This maintenance window will be between:

3 am – 4 am CDT (US) or
11 am – 12 am CET (Europe).

This work will require a system reboot during which your Paymo account will not function. Anyone using the Paymo widget or PaymoPlus will be able to track time, the entries will be saved locally and they will be synced online once the system is up and running.

For any questions don’t hesitate to contact us!

Here’s what’s new:

• Added support for checking for updates: automatically and manually from the menu
• Added sync button between projects and time entries filters
• Better network error handling.
• Support for connecting through proxy.

You can download the latest release here: http://www.paymo.biz/paymoplus/

We’re excited to release today PaymoPlus for Macs. Additionally, we added some new features & bug fixes:

• Small interface redesign
• Bug fixed which prevented the app from running on some systems (which we think fixes also the “proxy” issue)
• Ability to filter the Projects/Tasks tree which helps when there is a big list

We’ll also be releasing a Linux version in the near future, stay tuned!

If you’re already using PaymoPlus ver. 1.0.3 please follow the steps below before upgrading:

1. Stop PaymoPlus
2. Find the files paymoplus.ini and paymoplus.sqlite and copy them to a different directory. If you find files in both Program Files and here usersUSERNAMEappDataLocalPaymoPlus than copy the files from the appData folder
3. Uninstall the current version of PaymoPlus 1.0.3 (to be safe, delete the PaymoPlus directory from Program files)
4. Download and install version 1.0.5
5. Open “Help > About Paymo …” and see where the new version keeps its .ini and .sqlite files.
6. Stop PaymoPlus
7. Copy the files that you saved at step #2 to the new location where the program expects them to be (it’s ok to overwrite the existing ones)

You can download the app here http://www.paymo.biz/paymoplus/