Time tracking for freelance designers

You move between Figma, Illustrator and a Slack thread all day, and three clients share the same afternoon. Tracker records which window was in front of you and files that time under the client it belongs to, without a timer.

Where the hours go missing

• Three clients, six apps. A morning runs through Figma, Illustrator and a Slack thread, and by the afternoon you cannot say which of the three clients owns which half hour.
• Revisions that nobody logged. Round four of a logo is real work, but it arrives as a comment and leaves as an export. It rarely reaches a timesheet, so it rarely reaches an invoice.
• How long did that logo actually take? Without a record of where the hours went, you price the next identity job from memory, which is how a three-week project gets quoted as a two-week one.

What Tracker does about it

• Your files become your clients. One pattern per client on a window title or a URL. An Acme file open in Figma is Acme time, and the Northwind board in your browser is Northwind time.
• It records while you design. Tracker samples the front window every few seconds instead of asking you to start a timer, so the revision round you never planned for is logged like everything else.
• A number you can quote from. Pick a client and a date range and export an invoice-ready CSV with hours per day and per source. It is written to a SQLite file on your Mac and goes nowhere else.

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.

Keep reading

• Time tracking for freelancers: what to track, what to bill, and how to keep it honest
• How to track billable hours automatically (and stop reconstructing your week)