OPTIMAL: You either love it, or you haven't seen it. OPTIMAL is a must for any parent involved in divorce and custody issues. 'OPTIMAL' stands for Online Parenting Time Information Manager and Access Log. OPTIMAL is similar to SPARC's own Parenting Time Tracker (PTT), but is much more advanced. The OPTIMAL system is well thought out and complete, containing a powerful custody tracking application as well as a number of other useful tools.
OPTIMAL provides clear, understandable graphs of how parenting time was allocated, missed or denied, and the graphs are custom-designed to be used in court. Since the tool is web-based, no special software is required- just point your browser to the site, login, and start recording events, notes, and other items related to parenting time. OPTIMAL works with nearly any modern browser, including lesser-known browsers such as Konquerer and Gecko.
OPTIMAL can monitor compliance with your custody arrangement (including temporary orders) and can show interference with your parenting time, including late drop-offs, missed pickups, denied visits, etc. In addition to recording the start and stop times for every visitation period, OPTIMAL also provides places to record notes, expenses, the children's moods, other people present, and numerous other items of interest.
One very useful item that OPTIMAL tracks is "Non-Parental Time". This is time when the child isn't with either parent (such as time in school, daycare, etc). This value can be extremely useful in comparing the actual time that each parent has direct responsibility for the child.
Keeping track of all these things would be difficult and time-consuming to do in a spreadsheet or notebook, but the OPTIMAL tool arranges these items logically and fills in many of them for you automatically. During our testing, a typical entry could be done in just a couple of minutes.
Another great feature is the ability to import the SPARC Parenting Time Tracker spreadsheets. Transferring data from the Parenting Time Tracker into OPTIMAL is as easy as pressing a button. An entire year of PTT data can be imported into OPTIMAL in about 10 minutes or so.
OPTIMAL has many more features than we can cover in a simple review. For a detailed look at OPTIMAL, visit the www.ParentingTime.net site and look under the "Features" section or try the online demo.
OPTIMAL is an outstanding tool that gives you a lot of bang for the buck. The OPTIMAL system is the most effective way to track custody, and we prefer it over any other method available. We endorse OPTIMAL as an excellent value, and as a useful and powerful tool for use in any custody dispute.
Based on price (low) as well as utility (high), we rate the OPTIMAL Custody Tracker as a 5-star resource (on a scale of 1 to 5).
