Time and Billing Software: 12 Tools Compared

Time and billing software records billable hours and turns them into an invoice without anyone retyping the numbers. That single handoff, from timesheet to invoice, is what separates it from a plain time tracker and from plain accounting software.

Most teams end up with two systems and a spreadsheet in between. Hours live in one tool, invoices in another, and somebody spends the first Monday of every month reconciling them. This guide covers 12 time tracking and invoicing software tools, what each one costs, how each one handles billing rates, and where the money quietly leaks out of the process in between.

What time and billing software actually does

Time and billing software performs four steps in sequence: it records hours against a client or project, applies a billing rate, assembles those lines into an invoice, and tracks whether the invoice was paid.

Tools fail at different points in that chain. Plain time trackers stop after step one; our roundup of free time trackers covers that category on its own. Accounting packages start at step three and expect the hours to arrive from somewhere else. The category worth paying for is the one that covers all four without an export in the middle.

There is a fifth step that most buyers never ask about and later wish they had: comparing what the work was billed at against what it cost to deliver. Billing rates tell you revenue. Only cost rates tell you whether the job was worth taking. A tool that records one and not the other can produce a perfectly accurate invoice for a project that lost money.

How the billing math actually works

Billable hours are not the same as hours worked, and the gap between them is where most of the margin in a professional services business is decided.

Here is the calculation in full, using a six person consultancy as a worked example. The figures are illustrative, chosen to be realistic rather than drawn from any particular firm, but the structure is exactly what your reports should produce.

The line that catches people out is the fourth one. You bill 691 hours but you pay for 960. Every hour of internal work, admin, business development and rework sits in that gap, and it is charged to the business whether or not anyone invoices it.

That is why the billable share matters more than the rate card. Hold everything else constant and drop the billable share from 72% to 65%, a shift of seven percentage points that nobody would notice week to week:

Seven points of billable share cost this business $6,365 a month, roughly a third of its gross profit, with no change to headcount, rates or the number of hours anyone worked. Adding $5 an hour to the rate card would have recovered about half of it, which is why firms that only look at rates keep repricing and keep wondering why nothing improves.

To run this calculation you need three things from your software: hours split into billable and non-billable, a billing rate applied to the billable half, and a cost rate applied to all of it. Most tools in this category give you the first two. The third is the one to check for.

The five rate models, and who supports them

Rate handling eliminates more time and billing software than price does. Before comparing subscription costs, work out which of these five models describes how you actually charge.

1. One flat hourly rate.

   Everyone bills at the same number. Every tool here handles it, including the free ones, and if this is genuinely your situation you can choose on price alone.

2. A rate per person or per role.

   A senior designer bills at more than a junior developer. This is the most common step up from a flat rate and the point at which several cheap tools drop out.

3. A rate per type of work.

   Consulting bills higher than implementation, which bills higher than support, regardless of who does it. Useful when your pricing follows the service rather than the seniority of the person delivering it.

4. A rate per client or per project.

   A negotiated rate that overrides the standard one, usually because of volume or a long relationship. Any tool serving agencies needs this, and it is where rate precedence starts to matter.

5. Non-hourly billing.

   Flat fee, monthly retainer, milestone payments or contingency. Hours are still tracked, but they measure delivery against a fixed price rather than generating the invoice. This is a genuinely different product requirement and most hourly billing tools handle it badly or not at all.

Rate precedence, the detail nobody checks

Once more than one rate can apply to the same hour, your time and billing software has to decide which one wins. Tools that do this properly document a precedence order. Clockify is unusually explicit about it and is worth citing as the model of how it should work: it offers five levels of hourly rate and applies a strict hierarchy in which a more specific rate always overrides a less specific one, running from workspace rate, to member rate, to project rate, to task rate, to project member rate.

Ask any vendor you are evaluating to state their equivalent order. If they cannot, you will find out what it is the first time a client is billed at the wrong number.

The tools compared

Pricing was checked on each vendor’s own pricing page in August 2026. Where a promotion was running or no figure was published, this guide says so rather than quoting a number that expires.

Price tells you very little when comparing time and billing software. The table below is the one that separates the tools, covering how each handles rates and whether it can hand a finished invoice to your accounting system. Entries say “not published” where the vendor does not state it plainly, rather than guessing.

The tools in detail

actiTIME

• Billing rates per type of work
• Cost rates per person
• Profit and loss by client or project
• Timesheet approvals and locking

actiTIME is built around the fifth step most billing tools skip. Billing rates are set on types of work and applied to tasks, so the same hour carries a billable amount, while a separate cost of work rate on each person carries what that hour cost the business. Because both numbers sit on the same time entry, the Profit and Loss report compares billable amounts against costs by customer, project or task without anyone reconciling two systems.

Cost rates are set individually and cover regular, overtime and leave hours, which matters because leave and overtime are exactly the hours that quietly distort a margin calculation. Budgets can be set as a cost budget or a billing budget at customer, project or task level, with a progress bar that turns red when it is exceeded. Invoices are generated in the app as PDFs directly from tracked billable time.

The approval workflow sits before invoicing: a user submits a weekly timesheet, a manager with the right permission approves or rejects it in bulk, and editing an approved timesheet rolls it back to Not Ready. Pairing that with the Lock Time-Track permission stops entries changing after invoicing or period close.

Two honest limitations. Billing rates attach to types of work, not to individual people or roles, so if your pricing genuinely varies by who does the work rather than what the work is, you will need to model that as work types or look elsewhere. And actiTIME is not a bookkeeping system, so the ledger, tax and reconciliation still belong in Xero or QuickBooks.

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.

Try actiTIME

Harvest

• Time tracking with invoicing
• Timesheet approvals
• Payment collection
• Free single user plan

Harvest is the most direct answer to this category: track time, mark it billable, generate the invoice, take the payment. It is deliberately narrow and very good at the narrow thing, which is why it remains the default recommendation for small teams that bill by the hour and do not want a system to administer.

Two features earn it a place above the cheaper options. Timesheet approvals mean hours are reviewed before they reach a client rather than after. And the accounting handoff is real rather than an export: Harvest copies its invoices and recorded payments straight into QuickBooks Online or Xero, which removes the double entry that otherwise eats a morning each month.

The limitation is depth on the cost side. Harvest tells you what you billed with considerable polish. It is not the tool for working out what the delivery cost, so firms that need a margin figure usually end up pairing it with something else or moving on.

The free plan covers one person, which suits a freelancer indefinitely. Teams move to the paid tier quickly.

Pricing: free for one person. Paid plans from $9 per user per month, with a higher tier from $14.

Clockify

• Five levels of billable rate
• Separate cost rates
• Approvals and expenses
• Free for up to 5 users

Clockify is the cheapest credible way to get billable hours out of a team, and it is far more serious about rates than its price suggests. It offers five levels of hourly rate, applied through a documented hierarchy in which the more specific rate wins: workspace, then member, then project, then task, then project member. Custom rates can also be set for a particular client.

That precedence order is the reason to shortlist it. A senior designer working on a discounted charity project bills at the project rate rather than her personal rate, automatically, without anyone remembering to override anything. Very few tools at this price state the rule at all, let alone implement it.

Cost rates are available alongside billable rates, so the margin calculation is possible here too. Approvals, expenses and invoicing all exist, but invoicing sits on the paid tiers rather than the free one, so treat the free plan as the tracking half only. The trade off for the price is breadth: it is a tracking product with billing attached rather than a finance system, and reporting is shallower than the mid tier tools.

Pricing: free for up to 5 users. Paid from $3.99 per user per month billed annually.

ClickTime

• Fully burdened cost rates
• Blended and role based rates
• Timesheet approvals
• Capacity and utilisation

ClickTime sits between a timesheet tool and a finance system, and its distinguishing feature is the sophistication of its cost side. It applies fully burdened rates, blended rates or role based rates, which means the cost figure can include overheads rather than just salary. For anyone whose margin reporting has been quietly wrong because it only counted base pay, that difference is the whole point of buying the product.

Approvals are built for organisations where a manager signs off hours before anything is billed, and the mobile timesheets exist specifically so approvals do not hold up payroll or billing. Capacity planning and utilisation reporting sit alongside, which connects directly to the billable share calculation earlier in this guide.

It also markets itself for DCAA compliant time tracking, which makes it a common choice for organisations doing US government contract work where time capture rules are prescriptive. That is a narrow reason to choose it, but where it applies it is close to decisive.

Pricing: Starter from $12 per user per month billed yearly, or $15 monthly. Team is $19 and Premier $31.

Scoro

• Quotes through to invoices
• Retainer management
• Utilisation and margin reporting
• Project and resource planning

Scoro covers the whole agency workflow, from the quote to the invoice to the margin report. If you are currently running a proposal tool, a time tracker and an invoicing tool separately, it replaces all three, and the pipeline stays connected so a won quote becomes a project with a budget rather than a fresh piece of data entry.

Its strongest claim in this list is retainer management as a first class feature rather than an afterthought. If a meaningful share of your revenue is recurring monthly work rather than hourly billing, most tools here will make you fake it with recurring invoices and manual reconciliation of hours used against hours bought. Scoro treats it as its own thing, which is the single best reason to pay the premium.

Cost management and expense capture feed the margin picture, and it integrates with Xero, QuickBooks and Sage Intacct so the ledger stays where your accountant wants it. That breadth is also the cost: it is the most involved system here to set up, and a small team billing hourly will pay for a great deal it never switches on.

Pricing: from $17 per user per month, with higher tiers at $29 and $57.

Nutcache

• Project management with billing
• Recurring invoices
• Time tracking and expenses
• Free forever plan

Nutcache has repositioned toward project management with invoicing attached rather than the other way round, and it now leads with task management and project boards. For teams whose real problem is coordinating the work, and who bill hourly as a secondary concern, that ordering is an advantage rather than a compromise.

Recurring invoices are supported, which covers the simplest form of retainer billing, and online card payments are built in so invoices can be settled without a separate payment link. Expenses are tracked alongside time and can be pushed onto the invoice.

The free forever plan makes it worth trying for small project teams before committing. Be careful reading the price: figures are quoted in both Canadian and US dollars, and the toggle is easy to miss, so confirm which currency you are looking at before comparing it with anything else on this list.

Pricing: free forever plan. Pro is $20.95 per user per month, Enterprise $33.95, quoted in both Canadian and US dollars.

Bill4Time

• Hourly, flat fee and contingency billing
• Unbilled time and work in progress
• Trust accounting and LEDES
• Client portal

Bill4Time now presents itself squarely as a legal billing product, and it supports the three ways attorneys actually charge: by the hour, on a flat fee, or on contingency. That range of models is genuinely wider than most tools here manage, and it is the reason firms that tried general purpose billing software keep coming back to specialist legal products.

It also does something the rest of this list mostly does not: it tracks unbilled time and shows work in progress, so hours sitting on the books unbilled are visible as a number rather than discovered at month end. Combined with aging reports and trust balances, that gives a firm a live view of what it is owed and what it has not yet asked for.

Trust accounting and LEDES billing formats are legal specific requirements, handled here and absent almost everywhere else, and it connects to QuickBooks for the accounting side. For law firms that specialisation is a strength. For everyone else it is the wrong tool, and paying for trust accounting you will never use is a poor trade against the alternatives above.

Pricing: Time and Billing from $49 per month, Legal Pro $69, Enterprise $79.

FreshBooks

• Invoicing and payments
• Automatic time and expenses on invoices
• Tax calculation
• Client portal

FreshBooks approaches the problem from the invoicing end. Tracked time and expenses are added to invoices automatically and taxes are calculated in the same step, which suits businesses whose billing is more complex than their timekeeping. Automated reminders chase unpaid invoices without anyone writing the email.

For a small business or a sole trader, FreshBooks is often the accounting system rather than a feeder into one, which removes the integration question entirely. That is a real simplification, and it is why it appears near the top of search results for this category despite being a lighter time tracker than most of the tools above it.

The weakness is the same as its strength inverted. Time tracking exists and works, but it is not built for a team that needs rate precedence, approvals before billing, or a cost figure to compare revenue against. If your hours are the messy half of the problem, start elsewhere.

Pricing: a promotion was running at the time of writing, so the advertised figure is not the standard rate. Check current pricing directly.

Xero

• Full accounting
• Recurring invoices and reminders
• Multiple currencies
• Project time and costs

Xero is accounting software with project time tracking attached. If your accountant already works in Xero, keeping billing there removes a reconciliation step entirely, since the invoice is created in the ledger rather than copied into it.

On the billing side it is strong where accounting systems are strong: recurring invoices, automated reminders that chase unpaid invoices for you, multiple currencies, and the ability to track time and costs against projects. For a business billing international clients, the currency handling alone can outweigh a better time tracker.

The time tracking is adequate rather than deep. It records hours against projects and it will get an invoice out, but rate precedence, approval workflows and utilisation reporting are not what it is for. Note also that Xero runs aggressive introductory promotions, so the headline price you see is frequently a first six months rate rather than what you will pay in year one.

Pricing: promotional pricing was in effect at the time of writing. Check the standard rate before budgeting.

QuickBooks Online

• Accounting and invoicing
• Time tracking as a separate module
• Payments
• Payroll

The same logic as Xero. QuickBooks is an accounting system first, and time tracking arrives through QuickBooks Time as a separate module rather than being native to the ledger. It makes sense when the accounting decision has already been made and you want to avoid adding another vendor.

Its practical advantage is gravitational. QuickBooks is the system most other tools in this list integrate with first, so choosing it makes almost any future combination workable. Harvest copies invoices into it, Bill4Time connects to it, Scoro integrates with it and Invoice Ninja reaches it through Zapier. If you are unsure what your billing stack will look like in two years, the accounting end is the safest thing to standardise on.

The cost is that time tracking is priced separately from the accounting subscription, so the real monthly figure is two line items rather than one. We could not retrieve current pricing from the vendor site at the time of writing, so budget from a live quote rather than from any figure quoted second hand.

Pricing: see vendor site. Time tracking is priced separately from the accounting subscription.

Invoice Ninja

• Open source invoicing
• Self-hosting option
• Recurring and automatic billing
• Quotes with e-signature

Invoice Ninja is the option for teams that want to self-host and keep billing data on their own infrastructure. The self-hosted edition is free and open source, which makes it attractive to technical teams with a compliance or data residency reason to avoid hosted billing.

The billing feature set is more complete than the price suggests. Recurring invoices and auto-billing handle subscription and retainer style arrangements, and quotes can be sent for client approval by e-signature and then converted straight into an invoice, which closes the gap between winning work and billing for it. Time tracking and projects are included, as are expenses and a client portal.

Two things to weigh. Accounting integration runs through Zapier rather than a native QuickBooks connector, which is workable but is another moving part to maintain. And self-hosted means you own the upgrades, the backups and the uptime, so the software being free is not the same as the arrangement being cheap.

Pricing: self-hosted is free and open source. The hosted plan’s rate was not published in a form we could verify, so check directly.

Deltek Replicon

• Time and expense capture for billing
• Approvals and labour compliance
• Utilisation reporting
• Enterprise implementation

Deltek Replicon, previously Replicon, targets larger organisations that need billing and compliance to hold up under audit. It combines time and expense capture for accurate client billing with approval workflows and labour law compliance across a global workforce, which is a different problem from the one the small team tools in this list solve.

Its natural buyer is a professional services firm large enough that labour cost, billing accuracy and utilisation are reported to a finance function rather than checked by a founder. Deltek positions the product around exactly those three numbers, and the acquisition put it alongside the rest of Deltek’s professional services and government contracting range.

It is quote based and sold with implementation rather than signed up for online, so evaluating it is a procurement exercise with a timeline, not a trial you start on a Tuesday. If that sounds disproportionate to your situation, it probably is.

Pricing: quote only.

Where billable money leaks out

Most revenue lost in professional services is not lost to bad rates, and no time and billing software fixes it for you by default. It is lost to hours that were worked and never invoiced, and every one of these leaks is a reporting problem before it is a discipline problem.

1. Time logged after the invoice went out.

   Someone completes their timesheet late, the hours land in a period that has already been billed, and nobody raises a supplementary invoice for four hours. The fix is a submission deadline that precedes the billing run, plus a lock on the period once it has been invoiced so late entries appear as exceptions rather than being absorbed silently.

2. Work in progress nobody is watching.

   Hours worked but not yet invoiced sit as work in progress. On a monthly billing cycle a normal balance is roughly one month of billable work. When it starts creeping toward two, cash is being financed by the business rather than the client. Bill4Time surfaces this explicitly; with most other tools you will need to build the report yourself, so check on the trial that you can.

3. Write-offs treated as invisible.

   A partner trims two hours off an invoice because the client will object. That is often the right commercial call, but if the adjustment happens inside the invoice rather than being recorded as a write-off, the original estimate never looks wrong and the same job gets underquoted next time. Recorded write-offs are how estimating improves.

4. Non-billable work with no home.

   If a tool discards non-billable time, internal work, rework and business development disappear from the record. You then cannot calculate the billable share, which the worked example above showed is the single largest lever on margin. Track non-billable hours against real categories, not as a blank.

5. Scope delivered but never quoted.

   The extra round of revisions that was agreed on a call and never turned into a change order. No software prevents this, but a budget with a progress bar that turns red when the project passes its billing budget at least means somebody finds out in week three rather than at the final invoice.

Does this replace your accounting software?

Usually not. Time and billing software and accounting software solve adjacent problems, and the tools that try to do both are making a trade you should make deliberately. There are three workable arrangements.

A billing tool that feeds your ledger. The most common setup. Hours, rates, approvals and invoice generation happen in a specialist tool, and finished invoices and payments are copied into Xero or QuickBooks, where reconciliation, tax and reporting live. Harvest does this natively for both. Scoro integrates with Xero, QuickBooks and Sage Intacct. Bill4Time connects to QuickBooks. The question to ask is which direction the sync runs and what it carries: invoices and payments usually travel, hours and rates usually do not.

An accounting system doing both jobs. Xero, QuickBooks and FreshBooks all track time to some degree. For a small business whose only real accounting need is invoicing, this removes the integration question entirely. You accept shallower time tracking in exchange, which is a good trade when hours are simple and a bad one when they are not.

A billing tool that exports rather than integrates. Perfectly workable, and cheaper. actiTIME generates PDF invoices directly from tracked billable time and exports reports as CSV, which suits teams whose bookkeeper is comfortable importing a file once a month. The thing to establish before you commit is whether that file matches what your accountant actually wants, because discovering it does not is a month end problem rather than a setup problem.

What to check before you commit

Five things decide whether a piece of time and billing software works for you, and none of them appears prominently on a pricing page.

• How many rates it supports, and which one wins. One flat rate is common on cheaper tools. Professional services usually need rates that vary by type of work, by client, or by person. Then ask for the precedence order when more than one applies.
• Whether unbilled time is visible. The number that matters is hours worked but not yet invoiced. Some tools show it on a dashboard; others make you build a report.
• Approval before invoicing. A step where someone reviews hours before they reach a client. Rare on entry tiers and the thing that prevents awkward conversations.
• Whether cost sits next to billing. If the tool discards non-billable time or has no cost rate, you can invoice accurately and still have no idea whether the project made money.
• Whether the invoice is editable after generation. Real billing involves write-offs and adjustments, and a rigid invoice forces you back into a spreadsheet.

How to choose

1. Decide which end you are starting from.

   If your hours are messy, start with a time tracker that invoices: actiTIME, Harvest or Clockify. If your invoicing is messy but hours are fine, start with FreshBooks or your accounting system.

2. Count your rate structures before comparing prices.

   If you bill three clients at three different rates for two kinds of work, say so during the trial. Our comparison of billable hours trackers goes deeper on rate handling. That requirement eliminates more tools than any other.

3. Work out your billable share first.

   Before choosing anything, calculate hours billed divided by hours worked for last month. If you cannot, that is the problem to solve, and it points at a tool that tracks non-billable time properly rather than one with the nicest invoice template.

4. Check whether cost sits alongside billing.

   Billing tells you revenue. Only cost tells you whether the work was worth taking, and most tools in this category track one and not the other.

5. Run one full billing cycle on a trial.

   Track a week, approve it, raise the invoice, write off an hour deliberately, adjust it, and export to your accounting system. Problems surface at the write-off and export steps, both late in the month if you find them in production.

Frequently asked questions

What is time and billing software?

Time and billing software records hours worked against a client or project, applies a billing rate, and turns the result into an invoice. The defining feature is that the hours and the invoice live in the same system, so nobody retypes figures between a timesheet and an accounting package. Tools range from single-purpose products like Harvest to accounting systems like Xero with time tracking attached.

How is it different from ordinary time tracking software?

Ordinary time tracking stops once the hours are recorded. Time tracking and invoicing software carries those hours forward: it applies rates, separates billable from non-billable work, produces the invoice and usually tracks payment. If you currently export a timesheet to a spreadsheet before invoicing, you are using a time tracker rather than a billing system.

Is there free time tracking and invoicing software?

Partly. Harvest is free for one person, Clockify is free for up to 5 users though invoicing sits on the paid tiers, Nutcache runs a free forever plan, actiTIME is free for up to 3 users, and Invoice Ninja can be self-hosted at no cost. What free plans almost never include is approval workflows and multiple billing rates, which are exactly what a team billing several clients needs.

What if I bill different clients at different rates?

Check this before anything else, because it eliminates tools quickly. Cheaper products often support a single hourly rate per user. Clockify handles it through five rate levels with a documented precedence order and custom rates per client. actiTIME sets billing rates on types of work rather than on people, which suits pricing that follows the service. ClickTime and Scoro both handle layered rate structures. Simpler timers frequently do not.

Can these tools handle retainers and flat fees?

Fewer than you would expect. Most of this category is built around hourly billing, where the hours generate the invoice. On a retainer or a flat fee the price is fixed and the hours measure delivery against it instead, which is a different calculation. Scoro treats retainer management as a dedicated feature, Bill4Time supports flat fee and contingency billing, and Invoice Ninja, Nutcache and Xero all handle recurring invoices, which covers the simplest version. If recurring revenue is a large share of your billing, make it the first thing you test.

What is a good billable share?

It depends heavily on the business, and the useful comparison is against your own previous months rather than an industry figure. What matters more than the level is the sensitivity: as the worked example in this guide shows, a shift of seven percentage points in billable share can move gross margin by a third, because costs stay the same whether or not the hours were billed. Track the number monthly and treat a downward trend as the earliest available warning that a quarter is going wrong.

Bill the hours, then check the margin

Getting an invoice out is the easy half. The harder question is whether the work was profitable, and that 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.