A billable hours tracker records the time you can charge a client, separates it from the time you cannot, and applies a rate so the total becomes an invoice. The second half of that sentence is what makes it different from an ordinary timer.
Most teams discover the difference at month end, when the timesheet says 160 hours, the invoice says 96, and nobody can explain the other 64. This guide covers 10 billable hours trackers with verified pricing, the billing settings that quietly change what you invoice, and the point at which a spreadsheet stops being good enough.
What a billable hours tracker does
A billable hours tracker does four things an ordinary timer does not: it marks each entry billable or non-billable, applies a rate to the billable ones, rounds them to your billing increment, and totals the result per client.
Every one of those four is a place the number can go wrong. A tool that only supports one rate under-bills your senior people. A tool with no rounding rule produces invoice lines of 17 and 23 minutes. A tool that discards non-billable time makes it impossible to work out where the rest of the week went.
The tools below are ordered with the ones built specifically around billing first. If you only need a timer, our roundup of free time trackers is the better list.
Billing increments, the setting that changes your invoice
A billing increment is the smallest unit you charge in. Six minutes (0.1 hours) and 15 minutes (0.25 hours) are the two common ones, and the choice changes your revenue on identical work.
Take a day with eight separate client tasks, each genuinely taking seven minutes. That is 56 minutes of real work. Here is what three settings produce:
Nobody is being dishonest in that table. All three are standard practice, and the 15 minute version is normal in legal work. But it explains why two firms doing identical work report very different revenue, and why a client who notices will ask about it.
When a spreadsheet is genuinely enough
A free billable hours template in Excel or Google Sheets ranks near the top of search results for this topic, and for good reason. If you are one person, billing one rate, to fewer than about five clients, a spreadsheet is genuinely enough and costs nothing.
It stops being enough at four specific points, and they arrive in this order:
- A second person. Two people editing one sheet means version conflicts and hours entered from memory on Friday.
- A second rate. Different rates per client or per type of work turn one formula into a lookup table that somebody has to maintain correctly.
- Anyone approving anything. A spreadsheet has no state. There is no difference between hours that have been reviewed and hours that have not.
- A closed period. Nothing stops a colleague editing last quarter, so historical figures never stop moving.
If none of those apply to you, use the template. If two or more do, a tracker will pay for itself in a month on recovered hours alone.
The 10 trackers compared
Pricing was checked on each vendor’s own pricing page in August 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a figure or is running a promotion, this guide says so rather than quoting a number that expires.
| Tracker | Best for | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| actiTIME | Seeing billed and cost figures on the same hours | Free for up to 3 users, then $6 per user per month |
| Paymo | Billing tied to project delivery | Free plan, then from $5 per user per month |
| My Hours | Small teams billing several clients | Free for up to 5 active users, then $5 or $9 per user per month |
| TimeCamp | The lowest paid entry price here | Free forever plan, then from $2.99 per user per month billed annually |
| TMetric | Billable rates with task level detail | Pricing not published in a readable form; check directly |
| Early (formerly Timeular) | People who forget to start a timer | Not published on the pricing page we could retrieve |
| Accelo | Retainers and recurring client work | Quote based; no public price list |
| Apploye | Remote teams needing activity tracking | Free forever for up to 10 users; paid tiers on promotional pricing |
| WebWork Time Tracker | Monitoring alongside billable time | Free plan, then $3.99, $6.39 and $7.19 per user per month |
| Dovico Timesheet | Project teams with complex billing rules | Pricing page no longer published; quote only |
The trackers in detail
actiTIME
- Billing rates per type of work
- Cost rates per person
- Profit and loss by client
- Approvals and period locking
actiTIME answers a question most billable hours trackers cannot: not just what you billed, but what the work cost to deliver. Billing rates are set on types of work and applied to tasks, while a separate cost of work rate on each person covers regular, overtime and leave hours. Both sit on the same time entry, so the Profit and Loss report compares billed amounts against costs by customer, project or task.
Non-billable time is recorded rather than discarded, which is what makes the billable share calculation further down this page possible at all. Budgets can be set as a billing budget or a cost budget at customer, project or task level, with a progress bar that turns red on overrun.
Approvals run before invoicing: a weekly timesheet is submitted, a manager approves or rejects in bulk, and editing an approved sheet rolls it back to Not Ready. Pairing that with the Lock Time-Track permission stops anyone changing entries after a period has been invoiced. Invoices generate in the app as PDFs from tracked billable time.
The honest limitation: billing rates attach to types of work, not to individual people or roles. If your rate card genuinely varies by who does the work rather than what the work is, you will need to model that as work types.
Pricing: free for up to 3 users. Paid plans are $6 per user per month for 1 to 40 users and $5 for 41 to 200, with a 30 day trial and no credit card.
We reduced payroll processing to 45 minutes per week
actiTIME is very robust, integrated well into your business process, and most important, helps you focus on your business instead of monkeying around with technology. actiTIME has reduced our payroll processing from 4-6 hours per week to 45 minutes per week.
Paymo
- Billable and non-billable hours
- Invoicing from tracked time
- Project and task management
- Free plan available
Paymo treats billing as the end of a delivery process rather than a separate exercise. Work is planned as tasks, time is tracked against them, and the billable portion becomes an invoice without anyone re-entering figures. For teams whose real problem is that billing and delivery live in different tools, that single pipeline is the reason to look at it.
Hourly rates can be set at several levels, and time is flagged billable or non-billable as it is recorded, so the split survives into reporting rather than being reconstructed later. Invoices can be raised directly from approved time.
The trade off is scope. Paymo is a project management product with billing attached, so a team that only wants a billable hours tracker will pay for planning features it never opens. The free plan is a fair way to find out which side of that line you sit on.
Pricing: free plan available. Paid tiers start at $5 per user per month, with a Pro tier at $16.
My Hours
- Billable rates per project and task
- Client and project reporting
- Invoicing from logged time
- Free for up to 5 active users
My Hours is built narrowly around the job this article is about: log time against a client, apply a rate, produce a report or an invoice. There is no monitoring, no screenshots and no attempt to be a project management system, which makes it noticeably quicker to set up than most of this list.
Billable rates can vary by project and by task, which covers the two most common rate structures, and reporting separates billable from non-billable clearly enough to calculate a billable share without exporting anything.
It suits small consultancies and agencies billing several clients at different rates who want the billing question solved and nothing else. Teams needing approval workflows or cost rates alongside billing will find it thin.
Pricing: free for up to 5 active users. Basic $5 and Pro $9 per user per month billed monthly, reducing to $4 and $8 billed annually.
TimeCamp
- Billable hours and invoicing
- Automatic activity tracking
- Attendance and timesheets
- Free forever plan
TimeCamp has the lowest paid entry price in this list and still includes billing rather than reserving it for a higher tier. Its Starter plan is named around time and billing specifically, which tells you where the product’s focus sits.
Time can be captured automatically based on the applications and pages in use, then assigned to clients afterwards. That suits people whose day fragments across many short pieces of work and who lose billable minutes to forgetting the timer, which is one of the largest sources of unbilled time in practice.
The free forever plan is genuinely usable for timesheets, with billing features arriving on the paid tiers. Check the increment and rounding behaviour on the trial, since that is where cheap tools most often turn out to be inflexible.
Pricing: free forever plan. Starter $2.99, Premium $4.99 and Ultimate $7.99 per user per month billed annually, or $3.99, $6.99 and $9.99 billed monthly.
TMetric
- Billable rates per project and task
- Invoicing built in
- Wide integration list
- Browser based tracking
TMetric handles billable rates down to task level and includes invoicing rather than bolting it on, which puts it a step above the tools that only report hours. Its integration list is one of the longest in the category, which matters if your team already lives in a project tool and will not move.
It ranks consistently for billable hours searches and is a fair shortlist candidate for teams that want billing detail without an implementation project.
Pricing: the pricing page did not return figures we could read reliably, so check the vendor site directly rather than trusting a second hand number.
Early (formerly Timeular)
- Automatic time capture
- Dedicated billable hours tracking
- Physical tracking device
- Leave tracking
Timeular now trades as Early, so search results and older reviews still using the previous name refer to the same product. Its distinguishing idea is that people are bad at starting timers, so it captures activity automatically and lets you assign it to clients afterwards, with an optional physical dice you flip to switch tasks.
Billable hours tracking is a named feature rather than a side effect, and leave and productivity tracking sit alongside it. It suits consultants and freelancers whose day fragments across many small pieces of client work, which is exactly the pattern that loses the most billable time to forgetfulness.
Pricing: the pricing page we retrieved did not publish figures in a readable form. Check directly, and note the rebrand when comparing older reviews.
Accelo
- Retainers and recurring work
- Quote to invoice pipeline
- Client and project profitability
- Automated time capture
Accelo is aimed at service businesses whose revenue is not purely hourly. Retainers and recurring contracts are handled as their own thing rather than faked with repeating invoices, which is the single feature most hourly trackers get wrong and the main reason to look at it.
The pipeline runs from quote through delivery to invoice, with profitability reported per client, so it replaces several tools rather than slotting alongside them. That breadth means a real setup effort, and it is more system than a small hourly team needs.
Pricing: Accelo no longer publishes a price list and routes buyers through a how to buy page, so expect a quote rather than a signup.
Apploye
- Billable and non-billable hours
- Screenshots and activity levels
- GPS tracking for field teams
- Free forever for up to 10 users
Apploye pairs billable hours with employee monitoring: screenshots, activity percentages and location tracking for field teams. Whether that is a feature or a problem depends entirely on your culture, and it is worth deciding before the trial rather than during it.
The free forever plan covering up to 10 users is unusually generous for this category and makes it a genuine option for a small team that wants billing and oversight in one place.
Pricing: free forever for up to 10 users. Paid tiers were displaying promotional pricing against struck through higher figures at the time of writing, so confirm the standard rate before committing.
WebWork Time Tracker
- Billable hours and invoicing
- Activity monitoring
- Attendance and payroll
- Low entry price
WebWork combines billable time with monitoring and attendance at one of the lowest entry prices here. It suits distributed teams where the same tool needs to answer what was billable, who was working, and what payroll owes.
One practical note: the product now sits on webwork-tracker.com, and the older webworktracker.com address no longer resolves, so bookmarks and older links will fail.
Pricing: free plan available. Paid tiers are $3.99, $6.39 and $7.19 per user per month.
Dovico Timesheet
- Project time and cost tracking
- Complex billing rules
- Approval workflows
- Long established product
Dovico Timesheet is a long established project timesheet product aimed at teams whose billing rules are too complicated for a simple timer, with cost tracking and approvals alongside. It now sits within a small family of Dovico products rather than standing alone.
Worth knowing before you evaluate it: the public pricing page no longer resolves, so the buying process starts with a conversation. For a small team that wants to sign up and start today, that alone will rule it out.
Pricing: no published price list; contact the vendor.
Billable share, the number to watch
Billable share is billable hours divided by hours worked. It moves margin harder than your rate card does, and most firms cannot calculate it because their tool throws non-billable time away.
Take a six person team at 160 hours each, a $95 average billing rate and a $48 average cost rate. The cost applies to every hour worked; the rate applies only to the billable ones.
Seven percentage points of billable share, a shift nobody notices week to week, costs $6,365 a month. That is about a third of the gross profit, with no change to headcount, rates or hours worked. Putting $5 on the rate card recovers roughly half of it.
Which is why the question to ask a billable hours tracker is not only what it bills, but whether it still records the hours it cannot bill. A tool that deletes non-billable time hides the largest lever you have.
How to choose
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Count your rates first.
One flat rate means you can choose on price. Rates that vary by person, by client or by type of work eliminate most cheap tools immediately, so establish this before comparing anything else.
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Check the rounding rule.
Ask what increment it bills in, whether it rounds up or to nearest, and whether it rounds each entry or the daily total. As the example above shows, that setting alone can double an invoice.
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Confirm non-billable time survives.
If the tool discards it, you lose the ability to calculate billable share, and with it the clearest early warning that a quarter is going wrong.
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Decide whether anyone approves hours.
Approval before invoicing is rare on entry tiers and is the thing that stops unreviewed time reaching a client. If you need it, it narrows the list quickly.
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Run one real billing cycle on the trial.
Track a week with actual client work, approve it, raise the invoice, write off an hour deliberately, and export the result. Problems surface at the write off and export steps, and both are cheap to find in week one.
Frequently asked questions
What is a billable hours tracker?
A billable hours tracker records time against a client or project, marks each entry billable or non-billable, applies a billing rate, and totals the result so it can be invoiced. The distinction from an ordinary time tracker is the rate and the billable flag: without those, you have a record of hours worked but no way to turn it into money without a spreadsheet in between.
What billing increment should I use?
Six minutes and 15 minutes are the two standards, with 15 minutes common in legal work and six minutes more typical elsewhere. The smaller the increment, the closer the invoice is to actual time worked. Whichever you choose, apply it consistently and be able to explain it, because clients who compare invoices across suppliers will notice a difference that rounding alone can explain.
Is there a free billable hours tracker?
Several. TimeCamp runs a free forever plan, Apploye is free for up to 10 users, My Hours for up to 5 active users, actiTIME for up to 3, and Paymo has a free tier. What free plans almost never include is approval workflows and layered billing rates, which are exactly what a team billing multiple clients at different rates needs.
Do I need a tracker if I already use a spreadsheet?
Not necessarily. One person billing one rate to a handful of clients is well served by a free template. The moment a second person, a second rate, an approval step or a closed accounting period enters the picture, a spreadsheet starts costing more in reconciliation time than a tracker costs to run.
How do I calculate billable hours percentage?
Divide billable hours by total hours worked for the same period. Six hundred and ninety one billable hours out of 960 worked is 72%. Compare it against your own previous months rather than an industry benchmark, because the useful signal is the trend: a falling billable share moves margin faster than any rate change and shows up earlier than the revenue does.
Track the hours, then check the share
Recording billable time is the easy part. Knowing what the rest of the week cost you, and whether the job was worth taking, needs cost sitting next to billing on the same hours.
actiTIME records both, so the same timesheet produces the invoice and the margin, and the reports show it by client or project. Start a free 30 day trial. No credit card required, and the free version covers up to 3 users afterwards.
