Choose the tool by the question you need answered.
Start from the question you need answered, not the feature list. If you bill by the hour, the hours are the bill and almost any tracker will do. If you quote a fixed fee, the hours are not the bill: you need the fee split across the parts of the job, so each part can tell you what it is earning per hour while the work is still open.
Most tools answer the question you already know the answer to.
Every tracker on the market can tell you that Tuesday afternoon took three hours. That was never the hard part. The hard part arrives at the end of a fixed-fee job, when the hours are all recorded, the client has paid the agreed amount, and nothing in the tool can tell you whether the amount was any good.
So the choice is not really between products. It is between the questions the products are shaped to answer, and that shape follows from how they charge their own customers as much as from how you charge yours.
Write down the question before you open a pricing page
There are four questions a tracker can answer, and they are not equally hard. Deciding which one you actually need takes a minute and rules out most of the market.
If you bill by the hour, the first two are enough and you should stop there. The hours are the bill, so a total per project is not a proxy for the money, it is the money. If you quote a fixed fee, the total tells you almost nothing: the amount was agreed months ago, and what you need to know is what it works out to now.
- How long did that take? Every tool answers this.
- Where did my week go? Most tools answer this.
- Am I still inside the fee for this part of the job? Few tools answer this.
- What is this job paying me an hour, right now, while I can still act on it? Fewer still.
The four kinds of tool, and what each one is good at
Almost everything on offer is one of four shapes. None of them is a bad tool; they are answers to different questions, and the mistake is buying the shape that answers someone else's.
- A plain tracker. A timer, a project, a total, an export. Cheap or free, nothing to set up, and genuinely the right answer for hourly work. It knows what you did, not what it was worth, because a project label has no fee behind it.
- A tracker plus a spreadsheet. What most people who quote fixed fees actually run, and it works, because the spreadsheet holds the fee the tracker has no field for. The cost is that the money now lives in two places, one of which is updated by hand, so the reading is only as fresh as the last evening you spent on it.
- A firm-scale suite. Resourcing, timesheets to approve, billing and accounting in one system. Built for a practice with staff, and priced per seat because that is who it is for. On your own you pay for modules you will not open and you have to configure them before anything is useful.
- A phase-aware tracker. The fee is split across the parts of the job, and hours land on a part rather than on the job as a whole. It answers the money question live, and it deliberately does not do billing, accounting or resourcing.
Check the things that only bite three months in
None of these appears on a feature list, and every one of them is invisible during a trial and expensive afterwards. They are worth checking on purpose, in the trial, while switching is still free.
- How long one entry takes. Entry cost is what decides whether you still use the tool in month three, and a tool you have to reconstruct from memory on Sunday gets abandoned by week five. A half-tracked week is worse than none: it makes the rate look better than it was.
- Whether a total can be opened up. One average across a whole job lets a part that went badly hide behind a part that went well, and the next job gets priced on the average.
- Whether a document you already sent can change. A report a client received in March should read in June exactly as it did in March. If it is rebuilt from current data, editing a rate or a task later quietly rewrites something you have already been paid for.
- Whether the money reconciles to the cent. Amounts held as decimal fractions drift a cent at a time, and the drift surfaces in the one place you cannot explain away: a total in front of a client.
- What happens when you go over. Going over should change what you know, not stop the work or brand the job red for good. Whether the extra time is absorbed or charged is your decision, and the tool's job is to make sure you take it on purpose.
- What one person actually pays. Per-seat pricing is a fair model for a firm, and it means a solo user carries a share of a structure they never use.
Test one on a real job for one week
Trials get spent setting things up and never touching the thing you are actually buying. Use a job you are running now, not a sample project, and spend the week logging your real hours onto it, including the ones you will not charge for.
Then, at the end of the week, ask your question out loud and see how long the answer takes. If the tool is the right shape, it is on screen already. If it needs a spreadsheet, an export, or ten minutes of arithmetic, you have learned the important thing about it inside a week rather than at the end of the job.
One more check while you are in there: try to leave. Export everything and open the file. A tool that lets you take the record with you in a format you can read is one you can change your mind about, and that is worth more than any single feature on the list.
Common questions
Is a spreadsheet good enough?
For a while, genuinely yes, and it beats a tool you will not keep up. A spreadsheet holds the fee, and the arithmetic is not hard. What it cannot do is stay current on its own: the hours live in one place and the fee in another, so the reading is as old as your last update, and the answer arrives on Sunday evening rather than on the Wednesday you could still have acted on it.
Do I need any of this if I bill by the hour?
Mostly no, and that is worth saying plainly. When you bill by the hour, the hours are the bill: a plain tracker with a solid export answers your question completely, and structure you do not need is just friction. This whole page is about the case where the amount was agreed up front and the hours are the risk you carry.
What is an effective hourly rate?
The money a piece of work actually earned, divided by the hours it actually took. If a part of a job was agreed at €3,000 and took 50 hours, it paid €60 an hour. The same part at 70 hours paid just under €43. That second number is the one a fixed fee hides, and it is the number worth choosing a tool over, because it moves while you can still do something about it.
Should the tool handle billing and accounting too?
It does not have to, and asking for it narrows the field to systems built for firms. Bills and books are their own trade, with their own legal shape per country, and most solo practices already have something that does them. What a tracker owes you is the document that justifies the amount: the work, the hours, and any extra work on its own line.
How long should a trial actually take?
A week of real work, not a month of intending to. Setting up a sample project proves nothing, because the thing being tested is whether logging an hour is cheap enough that you keep doing it on a bad day. Put a live job in, track it for five working days, then ask the tool your question.
What does Phased do out of this list?
The fourth shape. A project is split into phases and tasks, each phase can carry its share of the fee, and hours land on the phase they belong to, so a phase reports what it has spent and what it is paying per hour while the job is open. It has no billing, no accounting, no resourcing, and no seats. Free covers 3 active projects and the full export; Pro is €7 a month.