Faster Time: Custom Application Tracking

Faster Time will automatically track a lot of the applications you use every day, but some firms have other software that should be tracked as well.

If you find yourself wishing that Faster Time tracked one of your applications, then you’re in luck!  We can configure Faster Time to track any application that runs on your computer!

We should begin by making sure that the application we want to track is currently running on our computer.  Now let’s open our settings window by going to Faster Suite on the Faster Ribbon, clicking the settings wheel, and selecting Revenue Generation on the left, then Time Recovery across the top.

If we scroll down, we’ll see an option here for Other Processes.  In order to track custom applications, we’ll need to enable this option by checking the box, then configure what applications should be tracked by clicking the settings wheel to the right.

The window that appears will let us select which custom applications to track and configure how we want to track them.  First let’s look at the top two dropdowns.

On the left, we can choose whether to only track the custom applications we include in the list below, track all applications except the ones listed below, or just track every process on our PC.

We highly recommend setting this to only track the applications that we intentionally include in the list.  Using the other two options here will create a separate entry in the work report for every single thing you do on your PC and can cause the list to get pretty cluttered.

On the right, we can choose whether we want to track applications by their process ID or by their window title.

Process ID is the ID number that Windows assigns to the application while it’s running and window title is the name of the window displayed at the top of the application while it’s open.

Different applications run in different ways, so we recommend testing this setting both ways to see which option more effectively tracks your custom applications.

Now that we’ve explored those settings, let’s add our application.

We can type application names into the box at the bottom, but the easiest way to add an application is to click the ellipsis button on the right side of the box and find the application we want to track in the list, then click the green plus icon.  This will automatically add the application name to our list in the format necessary for Faster Time to identify it.

After we add our application(s) to the list, we can click Save on the Custom Process Tracking window and Save and Close on the settings window.

Now if we do some work in the custom application and open our work report, we’ll see that Faster Time has created an entry for the application we added.