Timesheet Xpress is a single-minded application with just one aim; to record and bill for time. Not any old time, you understand, but time spent working for customers and clients by those employed in a service industry, such as accountants, IT consultants, lawyers and so on.

The software is easily installed on any PC running Windows 95 or later and employs a simple on-screen timesheet, much like an Outlook calendar. Each timesheet covers a fixed period of a week with user-definable timeslots from five minutes to an hour long.

Click on one of these and you can allocate it to a separately configured or imported list of clients/projects, with a separate user-defined task list available to categorise those allocations. You can also colour-code time, distinguish between chargeable and non-chargeable work and non-work items, and add free format notes to further explain how time has been spent - even recording associated expenses, if required.

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All of which is of little value if you neglect to fill in the timesheet, so there are also lots of features to help minimise that risk. For example, although you can update any slot whenever you want, the active slot remains open and highlighted and is automatically updated using whatever client/project and task you have open if you don't enter any data yourself. Moreover, when installed on a Windows 2000/XP PC, the application runs as a taskbar icon and can be maximised ready to receive data on a regular basis.

Each timesheet is stored as a discrete file which can be viewed, printed or e-mailed, for example, to enable users to send completed timesheets to a central co-ordinator for analysis and billing. Or you can do it yourself, the built-in reporting tools providing facilities to select time periods, customers/projects, tasks and other parameters required and either display the results on screen, generate a printed report or PDF, or export the results as an Excel spreadsheet or in a variety of other formats.

There's no report generator, but the built-in reports cover most requirements including an option to produce invoices based on timesheet data.

Three implementations of Timesheet Xpress are available, all based on the same core software. A cut-down single user version can be downloaded for free, the chargeable version adding the auto-updating of timesheets and support for sharing of client/project and tasks lists, billing rates and timesheets on a network. A multi-user version of the software is also available (from £57 + VAT for 3 users) to enable multiple users to record their time in companies where PCs are shared.

Time is money, as they say, but keeping track and billing for it is far from easy. Paper records are time-consuming and hard to consolidate and contact management tools often complex and expensive. Timesheet Xpress fills the gap and does it well.

This is a deceptively simple tool that does little more than record and bill for time. But that's important to a whole range of businesses and professions. Timesheet Xpress does exactly what it claims, with very little else on the market as simple to use or as affordable.