Timer people and timesheet people
There are two honest ways to record time, and most tools only serve one of them.
The timer works if you can build the habit of pressing start before you begin and stop when you finish. When it works it is accurate to the minute. When it fails — a phone call, a context switch, a day you simply forgot — it fails silently and leaves a gap you will reconstruct from memory anyway.
The timesheet assumes you will reconstruct. It gives you a grid of the week and lets you fill it in on Friday from your calendar and your sent folder. Less precise, far more likely to actually happen. For a freelancer billing in half-hours rather than minutes, that trade is usually correct.
What the grid has to show
A week across the top, your clients or projects down the side, and one number in each cell. That is the whole interface, and each part earns its place:
- The whole week at once, so an empty Tuesday is visible rather than merely absent.
- A row total, so you can sanity-check a client against what you remember.
- A day total, so a Thursday that adds up to fourteen hours flags itself as a mistake rather than a heroic day.
- Billable separated from non-billable, because the number that matters commercially is not how long you worked.
Entering time the way people say it
Small thing, disproportionate effect. If the box only accepts 1:30, every entry costs a moment of translation from however you were thinking about it.
Flowzivo accepts 1:30, 90m, 1.5h, 1h 30m and 45 min, and stores minutes either way. You write what you were going to write anyway.
And because most weeks repeat, an entry can be duplicated with today's date: the same project, the same description, one click. Three days of the same work is three clicks, not three forms.
The number to look at on Friday
Not hours worked. Unbilled value — the hours you have recorded and not yet invoiced, multiplied by the rate that applies to them.
It is the most useful figure a freelancer has and almost nobody calculates it, because it requires knowing which hours are billable, which are already invoiced, and at what rate. Hours logged tells you how you spent the week. Unbilled value tells you how much money is sitting in the timesheet waiting to be asked for — which is the number that turns a Friday review into an invoice.
Start the timer instead of reading about it
The demo is the real product with example data in it. No account, nothing to install, and anything you add you can keep when you sign up.
No account to look around. Example data, and anything you add is yours to keep.
Questions
Is a timesheet accurate enough to bill from?
For work billed by the half-hour or hour, yes — reconstructing Tuesday on Friday is generally accurate to within a few minutes, and the alternative is often no record at all. For work billed in six-minute units, use the timer.
Can I use the timer and the timesheet together?
Yes, and most people end up doing exactly that: the timer on days when you are working on one thing for hours, the grid to fill in the fragmented days afterwards. Both write the same entries.
What about time I cannot bill?
Record it and mark it non-billable. Admin, quoting, and your own marketing are real hours, and knowing that they are 30% of your week is what explains why your effective rate is lower than your quoted rate.
Does the timer survive closing the tab?
Yes. A running timer is stored, so a reload or a crash does not lose it. It does not keep counting while your computer is off, which is the behaviour you want — an overnight timer produces a fourteen-hour entry you then have to correct.