The only reason a freelancer should track time
It is not discipline and it is not productivity. It is that at the end of the month you need to turn work into an invoice, and the difference between an invoice built from a log and one built from memory is usually several hundred euro in your client's favour.
This has a design consequence. A time tracker for one person should be fast to write to and should end in an invoice. Everything else — reports on utilisation, comparisons between team members, approval workflows — is machinery for a problem you do not have.
A running timer and a way to fix it afterwards
Flowzivo has a timer you start against a client and, optionally, a project. It keeps running while you move around the application and survives a page reload, because the alternative is losing an afternoon of work to a browser restart.
It also lets you add an entry by hand, with the duration typed as hours and minutes or as plain minutes. This matters more than the timer does: nobody starts a timer for the phone call that arrives unannounced, and the honest way to handle that is to make after-the-fact entry as quick as live tracking.
Billable and non-billable, tracked separately
Not everything you do for a client can be charged, and not everything you do at your desk is for a client. Admin, invoicing, the proposal you wrote for a job you did not win — these are real hours and they are not billable.
Flowzivo flags each entry as billable or not. The invoice builder only draws on the billable ones, so nothing uncharged sneaks onto a document. Meanwhile the total of both is what tells you your real hourly rate, which is almost always lower than the number you quote and worth knowing.
From a month of entries to one invoice
When it is time to bill, you select a client and a period, and Flowzivo builds an invoice from the unbilled billable entries in it, grouped and described. The entries are then marked as billed, so the next invoice cannot include them twice — which is the error that spreadsheet-based tracking produces most often.
The line items remain editable before you save. In practice you will usually merge a few entries into one description a client can read, and that is easier to do against a generated draft than against a blank invoice and a spreadsheet in another window.
What your logged hours tell you about your pricing
After two or three months of tracking, you can answer a question most freelancers guess at: what did that fixed-price job actually pay per hour? Take the total invoiced for a project and divide it by every hour logged against it, billable or not.
The answer is frequently uncomfortable. Jobs that felt profitable turn out to have absorbed twenty hours of revisions; clients who negotiated hard on the quote turn out to be the ones who also cost the most to serve. Neither of those is visible from the invoice total alone, and both should change what you quote next time.
This is the real return on tracking time, and it only arrives if you also log the hours you cannot bill. A log that contains only billable work will tell you that every project was profitable.
Rounding, and being fair about it
Rounding every entry up to the nearest half hour is common, defensible when it is disclosed, and quietly corrosive when it is not. A client who works out that six two-minute emails became three billed hours will not raise it — they will simply stop calling.
Flowzivo has a rounding setting so the behaviour is a decision you make once rather than something that happens by habit. Whatever you choose, put it in the quote.
Look at a week of tracked hours
The demo has six time entries across four clients, some billable and some not, with a couple logged today. Start the timer, or turn the unbilled ones into an invoice.
Open the demo →Questions
Does the timer keep running if I close the tab?
The timer's start is stored, so reopening the application resumes it with the correct elapsed time. It does not need the tab to stay open.
Can I track time against a project rather than a client?
Both. An entry always belongs to a client and can optionally belong to a project, which is how you see whether a fixed-price job made sense.
Can I set a different hourly rate per client?
Yes, and the client's rate is used when hours are turned into invoice lines. A global default rate covers clients without one.
What stops me billing the same hours twice?
Entries are marked as billed when they are turned into an invoice, and the invoice builder ignores them from then on.
Can I see the hours before I invoice them?
Yes. The demo has a week of example entries across four clients, some billable and some not, so you can look at how it reads.