By Ross Sudentas —

How to add time tracking to your Virtual Staffing/Freelancing website for free

This article has a very small target audience. If you have a website where you help your customers find temporary remote employees like upwork.com or freelancer.com but smaller – this article is for you, otherwise you’d probably be better off reading about something else.

Every virtual staffing agency and freelancers / temps website needs a time tracking tool. Most of remote work is being paid hourly and without a reliable time tracker your clients have to rely on … what exactly? Faith?

So you are faced with a choice – invest a few hundred thousand dollars developing something basic or use a reliable established brand like ScreenshotMonitor.com that tracks time, screenshots, apps, websites, activity levels, works on Widows, Mac & Linux and has the fastest and cleanest interface among similar software.

Until recently the only choice we have offered was a full-blown integration like we did for Outsource.com and PeoplePerHour.com – you can read about it in this article. Our service was seamlessly integrated and branded to client’s website. And this is still a great option – the only downside is that it requires a few thousand dollars to pay for integration.

Now we can offer another option that costs you nothing to start. The basic idea is that

  1. you send your clients to track their employees’ time for free on ScreenshotMonitor.com
  2. they enter a promo code during sign up (so we could identify them as your active clients)
  3. they use ScreenshotMonitor the same as our own customers using Professional version, just never asked to pay
  4. every month you pay us a very modest usage fee based on the total number of hours all of your clients have tracked in the previous month

Interested to know more? Contact us with the best time to reach you and phone/Skype number and we will be happy to explain all of the details.

Technical details

In order for us to verify that a particlular customer is actually your customer and is currently allowed to track his emplyees’ time for free – you’d need implement a simple JSON endpoint on your side:

https://yourwebsite.com/validatessmpromocode.json?promocode=XXXX&email=XXXX&secret=XXXX

Where

  • promocode is a user-entered promo code (starting with predefined two-letter ID of your website). Promo codes should be unique for each user.
  • email is an email of a user trying to redeem promo code. We email it to make sure the promo code is used only by a single customer.
  • secret is a secret token shared between your website and Screenshot Monitor.

If the promo code is valid for that email, you would return JSON like this:
{ status: "success", maxEmployees: 5 }

If the promo code is not valid, then return:
{ status: "invalid_promocode" }

If email is not found, then return
{ status: "invalid_owner" }

The screenshot monitor service will periodically (daily) check this endpoint for changes and give users a warning if they come over limit.

Again: if you are interested to know more – Contact us with the best time to reach you and phone/Skype number and we will be happy to explain all of the details.