Time Tracking
From a simple daily timer to billable-hours invoicing
Time tracking splits into two genuinely different use cases that often get sold as one product. The first is personal awareness: a freelancer or maker wants an honest picture of where their hours actually go, with minimal setup — start a timer, stop a timer, see totals. The second is billing: a consultant or lawyer needs time logged in a format that matches how they invoice, which almost always means rounding to a fixed increment (6, 10, 15, or 30 minutes) rather than tracking to-the-second and doing manual math before every invoice.
Heavy time-tracking suites try to serve both cases plus team management, project hierarchies, and reporting dashboards — which is real overhead if you just need the timer to stay out of your way. Hourglow is built for the first case (one-click start/stop, a quiet menu bar presence, fully local); Hourledger is built specifically for the second (one-tap billing timer with automatic rounding to your invoice increment, per-client totals) — different apps for genuinely different jobs.
The app
Hourledger Time
Hourledger is a billable-hours tracker built for freelancers, consultants, and lawyers who invoice by the hour — fast, fully offline, and wi…
Hourglow
Hourglow is a fast, focused time tracker for your Mac — start a timer with one click and get back to work. No project wizard, no cloud sync,…
How it compares to other tools
Frequently asked questions
Why does billing increment rounding matter for invoicing?
Most hourly-billing professions invoice in fixed increments (commonly 6-minute/0.1-hour units, the legal-industry standard, or 15/30-minute increments elsewhere) rather than exact elapsed time. Tracking to the second and rounding manually before every invoice is tedious and error-prone; a tracker that rounds automatically to the correct increment removes that step entirely.
Do I need project hierarchies and team features, or just a simple timer?
That depends on whether you're tracking your own time or managing a team's. A solo freelancer or maker generally just needs accurate start/stop totals per task or client. Project trees, team dashboards, and approval workflows matter for agencies and teams coordinating billable work across multiple people.
What's the practical difference between per-client totals and a single running total?
If you work with multiple clients or projects, per-client totals let you see exactly how your time split without manually filtering or exporting — important both for your own awareness and for generating separate, accurate invoices per client.