For freelancers
Billable hours for consultants
Zoom · Notion · Google Docs · Mail
Consulting is calls, documents and email spread across four clients, and almost none of it leaves an artefact you can count on Friday. Tracker records where the hours went while the work happens, per client, on your own Mac.
Where the hours go missing
- The day is calls, docs and email. Two calls, a deck in Google Docs, a Notion page and forty emails, across four clients. Almost none of it produces something you can count afterwards.
- Retainers nobody is counting. A twenty-hour retainer only works if you know where you stand in week three. Most people find out in week five, once the hours are already spent.
- Defending an invoice line by line. When a client asks what the eleven hours on Tuesday covered, “strategy work” is not an answer. You need the day broken down, and you need it to be true.
What Tracker does about it
- Every client gets its own rules. A Notion workspace, a shared document or a mail thread title maps to a client, so that window is their time whichever app it happens to be in.
- Idle time is not billable. Step away for lunch or a walk and the gap is cut out of the day, so what you invoice is time you were actually working rather than time the Mac was switched on.
- A breakdown you can send. Pick a client and a period and export a CSV with hours per day and per source. That is the retainer status in week three and the answer to “what was that Tuesday?” in week six.
Tracker is a macOS menu-bar app built by one person, and the reasoning behind the local-only design is written up on the about page.