Ask HN: What are good self hosted time tracking software for consultants?

Some of our users are using Baserow for time tracking. It can be self-hosted, and you can create a data structure that fits your needs. You can for example create a projects table containing all the projects you're working on. Then create a time table with a relationship to the projects, a numeric "hours spend" field and a description field. Every time you worked on a project, you just add a time entry. You can also share worked hours with your clients.

For a long time, I just tracked each invoice's hours in a file as s-expression data (today, it might be JSON), and it loaded a small script to generate an HTML invoice, intended for printing to PDF. This worked fine, including when I had to divide the hours between two contracts (just another line of code, figuratively), and when the info clients needed on the invoice changed, and when client now needed invoices to be physically signed by hand. (At one point, this evolving script became the first user of one of my HTML-related libraries: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-template/ )

Then I moved to GnuCash invoices, where each line item was rough notes on what I was working on that day, updated throughout the day. I modified one of the invoice-printing scripts to hide the notes, showing only hours and dollars for each day. Then GnuCash's normal accounts-receivable functionality. For periodic reports on what I'd done, I looked at the daily notes for a reminder of everything I did, and quickly summarized to higher-level paragraph, which got emailed. (GnuCash for invoicing alone wasn't worthwhile for my very simple needs that could've been handled with the standalone script, but the AR functionality was actually useful for reconciling payments and making sure no invoice was missed by client, and it also put this billable hours together in one place with my other financial transaction data, to give me an up-to-date picture of the whole thing.)

A tip that applies to whatever method you use: since a consulting invoice represents 4-5 figures of revenue for work already completed, this might be some of your most valuable data, and it's changing daily, so have good backups. I wasn't too confident in my data backups, so I always kept a printed invoice-in-progress on my printer. (My custom invoice formatting script detected from GnuCash data whether or not the invoice was in-progress, and marked it appropriately.)

For the last couple of years, I have been using a combination of Clocking commands [0] in Emacs along with org-journal. It has been working well enough for me. Although, I had to send some patches to org-journal initially to suit my workflow.

[0] https://orgmode.org/manual/Clocking-commands.html

[1] https://github.com/bastibe/org-journal

For my specific work flow I was actually thinking of scraping all my git repos to see my activity. Because I'm always working in a git repo, or mostly.

I actually already did try using some sort of recursive git status/log viewer that I can't remember the name of now. Didn't keep it up but I think a program that scrapes my git repos, and perhaps aggregates with other activity logs, would be the best fit.

I've used activity watch and like it: https://github.com/ActivityWatch