The Best Time-Tracking Apps For Freelancers And Teams In 2018

If you’re a freelancer, you likely don’t need all the bells and whistles offered by more robust time tracking apps for teams. What you need is a great time tracker built for you and your projects. Something that stays out of your way, but easily tracks time. Or, for a more personal use, sometimes you just want to know how much time you spent watching TV, walking the dog, or doing chores. We live in a world of data and if you're a self-tracking enthusiast, then you'll find the following time trackers are built just for you, too. Toggl has quickly become a popular choice for time tracking—and for good reason. With it's easy-to-use and sleek design, deep list of integrations, and companion apps (mobile and desktop)—it really does seem to have everything you could want. Tag time entries in order to group activities, such as writing, across multiple projects or clients. 9/month Pro plan, you can indicate whether a task is billable or not.

For reports, Toggl gives you a variety of report types and filters, as well as the ability to bookmark reports (a Pro feature) or export them to CSV, PDF, or Excel. The reports provided by Toggl are some of the nicest reports we saw among the list of apps. Where Toggl gets really powerful though, is with its desktop app. While the web and mobile apps are great for tracking your time, you still need to manually start the timer (although on iOS, you can add the Toggl widget to the Today view to make accessing your timers painless). With the desktop app, you get the ability to have the timer monitor your program and website activity, use keywords to autotrack time, detect your idle times from the computer, and even use reminders. When you take advantage of all these features, tracking time almost becomes automatic—which is great for someone like me who constantly forgets to turn on or switch a timer between tasks. 10/mo per user Pro account. For more info, see our Toggl review. See Toggl integrations on Zapier.

For those looking for an easy-to-use time tracker without too many features, Hours should be one of your top contenders. Since Tapity launched the app, Hours has received nothing but an outpouring of support for the app from users and tech reviewers. Forbes even called it "the perfect iPhone time tracking app". Featuring a visual timeline, smart reminders, and beautiful reports (which can be viewed online or exported to PDF or CSV), Hours makes time tracking actually enjoyable. It includes a Today view widget and an intuitive timeline that helps you see what you’ve worked on and the time gaps you missed. You can also include notes and turn on time-rounding rules. The Hours iOS app syncs instantly with their web app, so you can move between devices and timers seamlessly. They've also designed a smart interface that makes it easy for you to switch timers throughout the day, as you naturally switch between tasks and projects.

For teams, Hours includes administrative tools that will help managers track employee progress, and spot behavior patterns. Qbserve is a versatile, desktop-only time tracking app that will automatically track all the time and activity on your Mac. This app is ideal for those who want a hands-off time logging app that also helps them track productivity.. Categorize time spent into "Productive," "Neutral," or "Distracting" based on the tasks and programs that are important to your job, then view daily and weekly reports to see where your time is really going. While apps like RescueTime also do this, Qbserve goes a step further. Add projects within Qbserve in order to track time spent specifically for a client, personal, or work project. You can then set up project rules that allows Qbserve to automatically log time into that project based on predefined keywords. ClientXYZ. From there, the app will log all time spent in those documents as time for your Client XYZ Project.

Don't worry—it's easy to double check and adjust your time logs, to make sure everything's correct. Once you've confirmed your logs, create and format your invoice in just a few clicks. Qbserve is designed to make sure that time tracking, reporting, and invoicing for freelancers is as thorough and painless as possible. Want to do more with these reports and invoices, Qbserve is built for easy integration through Zapier. And unlike many time tracking apps, Qbserve has a one-time purchase price—no subscriptions, no pricing plans. Just one simple price for full access to the app. 40 one-time price for the Mac OS download. Paydirt is an innovative web-based solution to time tracking—complete with built-in quote builder and invoicing. In Paydirt, you can quickly set up projects and project tasks on a per-client basis, which you'll use to track your time. The Paydirt Chrome extension is a big part of the app's appeal. Once you install the Chrome extension, Paydirt will constantly parse websites as you visit them for specific keywords (that you set-up in advance).