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Ask HN: How do you track your billable working hours?

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11–20 of 38 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your billable working hours?

#11
ledger-cli tool + a stop watch

https://www.ledger-cli.org

It also acts as my accounting tool And manages different currencies for me Along with helping me analyse my expenses , etc in one place

GnuPlot + Ledger-cli together gives me pretty graphs anytime i want to see how im progressing at any point :)

I have a python script which autogenerates my invoices based on this ledger data file at end of each month and emails it to my clients with a link for payment.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your billable working hours?

#13

I invoice for the maximum number of hours I can get away with, not sure what is the benefit of using the actual number of hours worked?

It sounds like you’re fraudulently reporting hours you worked and stealing from the client.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your billable working hours?

#15
Quickbook - https://quickbooks.intuit.com/in/

They have a decent interface, press the "clock in" button and the time starts. Whenever you want you can "clock out". You can see the "total time" report as well as the invoices or payout made.

The only downside I see is that when you "clock in" you get a small input box in which you can choose to write whatever work you've done or you are doing. The issue is that box is super small and you can't really see that much in it. So there is lot of scrolling involved.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your billable working hours?

#16
post #7

Harvest (and the hcl gem). Bonsai is supposed to be pretty good, too.

When I used to bill per hour, I used Harvest - https://www.getharvest.com/ and their mac app https://www.getharvest.com/apps/mac.

The great thing about the app is that if your computer is idle for a while it stops the timer. That was the most annoying thing that used to happen to me. When I went to pick up the kids or something I would forget to stop the timer. But the app automatically stops the timer and asks you to confirm.

I still use harvest to bill my clients using the invoice feature. Their free plan is all I have ever needed.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your billable working hours?

#17
I use an app I made for myself:

[link redacted]

The main downside is probably that it doesn't automatically share data between devices, but it's fine for me as I just use it on my main work PC.

It can save/load data to files so I have an `inotifywait` script watching my Downloads folder. When I save/download a file from the app it automatically gets backed up to cloud storage.

I'm not sure how usable it might be for people. I've made a start on hints/instructions but that part of it is pretty threadbare as I've not got around to sharing it with others yet.

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