Project time tracking software for client work

Choose project time tracking software by the steps between recording an hour and billing it: capture, review, report and invoice. If your accounting software already sends invoices, focus on rates and clear exports. If you want to bill from the tracker, check invoice history, unbilled hours and accounting connections as well as the timer.

The useful differences appear when several people contribute to one client’s work. Can a lead check everyone’s entries together? Can they correct a rate or project, then produce the report the client expects? Those are better trial questions than counting timer features.

The comparison covers tools for different parts of that workflow. The consultant shortlist and agency comparison go deeper on those team setups.

What should happen between the timer and the invoice?

Check four steps on one client project. A tool that records hours well can still leave the billing work to a spreadsheet.

1. Capture: put each entry on the right client and project, with its rate and billable status.
2. Review: find missing time, fix wrong projects and check descriptions while the work is still fresh.
3. Report: show the client’s hours by project or activity without rebuilding the totals.
4. Invoice: bill the reviewed entries or export them to accounting, with a way to identify hours already billed.

How do you track, review and invoice one client’s work?

It is five steps in one tool: set up one client with two projects, track billable and internal work, fix what went wrong, run the client report, and create the invoice from that report if the client is billed by the hour. This illustrative example follows a small team working for a fictional client, Henderson Design Studio, in Timen.

Set up one client and two projects. Create the client, then two projects linked to it: a website refresh billed at $95 an hour and brochure copy at $80. Each project carries its own billable rate. Timen uses a person's own rate first if one is set and the project's rate otherwise, so leave personal rates empty when a client pays different rates per project. Give your colleague access to both projects so they appear when they log time.

Track billable and internal work separately. Start the timer or add an entry by hand afterwards, pick the project, and the client comes with it. Every entry has a billable switch. Internal work, such as a studio admin project with no client, is simply logged as non-billable, and so is time on the client project you have decided not to charge, like redoing a layout because of your own mistake. The phone apps and the community-built TimenBar Mac menu bar app log to the same account, so hours from a client visit do not wait for the laptop.

Correct the entry that went to the wrong place. Say 45 minutes on Wednesday was logged to brochure copy but was really website work. Open the entry from the timer list or click its block in the calendar, change the project, adjust the times or the billable switch, and save; the duration recalculates. Once an invoice has gone out, an admin can lock timesheets before a date, or automatically each week or month, so members cannot edit hours behind it. That is a lock, not an approval workflow, and admins and owners can still make corrections.

Run the client report. Open Reports, pick the month, filter to Henderson Design Studio and to billable time that is not yet invoiced, and group by project with a second grouping by person. The summary view gives each project's total; the detailed view lists every entry for a line-by-line check. Download it as a PDF for the client or a CSV for a spreadsheet. For many retainer or fixed-fee clients, this report is the deliverable and you can stop here.

Create the invoice when the client pays by the hour. Click Invoice on the report and the same filters carry over. From the summary view you get one line per project; from the detailed view, one line per time entry, linked back to it. Rates are filled in from the person or the project and stay editable per line. Add a manual line for anything that is not time, apply tax or a discount, and download the PDF or send it straight to QuickBooks Online, Xero, FreshBooks or Wave; outside Wave, a re-send updates the same invoice rather than creating a duplicate. You set the status yourself, draft, sent or paid, and entries on a sent or paid invoice are left out of the next one automatically, which is what keeps an hour from being billed twice. The invoice help page has the details for each accounting system.

That is the whole loop. What you will not find in it is a submit-and-approve step, a budget warning when the website refresh passes its estimate, or a retainer balance that stops the timer at 20 hours. If your client contracts depend on those, Harvest, Clockify or Paymo cover some of them on their paid tiers. For more on the handoff itself, see the hours-to-invoice handoff.

Why review hours before they become a report or an invoice?

Because the invoice should not be the first time anyone looks at the hours. When billing is the review, gaps, wrong projects and unclear descriptions are found under deadline, and the client gets whatever was quickest to fix. A separate review step, even fifteen minutes on a Friday, catches them while people still remember the week.

A good review follows a predictable order. Check for missing time and obvious project mistakes first, then confirm what is billable, then clean up descriptions so they read well to the client, and only then move the reviewed set into a report or invoice. Teams that skip the order polish invoice wording while misfiled hours still sit underneath. A short Friday review of billable time is the habit that makes this routine, and a clear billed versus unbilled split is what stops the same entry turning up on two invoices.

Multiple contributors make it matter more. Each person may be accurate on their own, but the combined report still looks messy when one writes "call" and another writes "Kick-off call with marketing team". The tool helps by putting the whole team's week for one client in one view; the habit does the rest. It also helps to decide what belongs in the tracker at all, and we made the case for keeping internal time out separately.

The simplest test of whether you need more structure: look for the first place the team explains the hours twice. If someone writes one description in the tracker and a clearer one in the invoice tool, or a spreadsheet exists only to track which hours are billed, the tracker is not carrying enough of the workflow. A solo freelancer with two recurring clients and one rate rarely hits that point; a five-person consultancy with shared accounts, scope changes and clients who want detailed invoice notes hits it quickly. The difference is not company size alone, it is how much meaning each entry has to carry after it is logged.

How were these nine tools compared?

We checked vendor documentation for client structure, billable rates, review, reporting and invoicing, with US-dollar prices and plan limits. We did not run client projects in all nine tools. The linked G2 and Capterra reviews add examples of daily use; they do not override documented capabilities or represent every customer.

How do the nine tools compare side by side?

The quick scan: what each tool is for, which plan first gives you billable rates and invoicing, and what it costs.

Nine project time tracking tools for client work

Each of these gets project hours into a client report from a different starting point. Some start from the invoice and add tracking, some start from a fast timer and leave billing to accounting software, and a couple start from project management or attendance and treat client billing as one module among many. Knowing which starting point suits your team narrows the list faster than any feature grid.

Capture and reporting

Trackers for reviewing client hours or keeping time inside an existing project tool.

Toggl Track - clean team reports, with only basic invoices

Best for: Teams that care most about people actually tracking their time and about clean, filtered reports, and that already send invoices from accounting software.

• Pricing: Free for up to 3 users, with PDF export only and no billable rates. Starter is $9 per user/month billed annually ($12 monthly) and adds billable rates, rounding, filtered team reports and CSV export. Premium is $16 ($24 monthly) and adds timesheet approvals, fixed fee projects, labor costs, profitability reports and project dashboards. Enterprise is priced on request, and onboarding help and Time Off Pro are optional paid add-ons.
• Rating: 4.6/5 on G2 from 1,644 reviews; 4.7/5 on Capterra from 2,589 reviews (both listings cover the whole Toggl product)

Toggl's strength has always been the timer: one click from the web, desktop, mobile apps or browser extension, calendar integrations, and an interface people do not resist. New sign-ups now get the combined Toggl product, which adds task boards and a timeline for planning, while existing Toggl Track accounts carry on as before. For client reporting, Starter is the real entry point, because that is where billable rates, rounding and team-level reports with filters appear.

Invoicing is thin. From a Summary or Detailed report you can create a PDF invoice with your own billing details, extra lines, tax and a memo, and any user can do it, though PDFs from the free plan carry Toggl's logo. Toggl's own invoicing page mostly points you to exporting billable hours as CSV or PDF for the invoicing tool you already use. That is perfectly workable when invoices go out from QuickBooks or Xero anyway, and it is extra work when the person reviewing the hours also bills them. Client profitability, fixed fees and approvals are Premium features, and Toggl states plainly that it does not take screenshots or monitor activity.

What users say about Toggl Track

For how its billing compares with the invoicing specialist, see how Toggl and Harvest bill.

Everhour - time, budgets and invoices inside your project tool

Best for: Teams of five or more whose client projects already live in Asana, Trello, Jira, ClickUp or a similar tool, and who want time, estimates and budgets on those same tasks.

• Pricing: Free for up to 5 seats, with time tracking, projects and tasks, reports and export, but no integrations and no billing features. Team is $8.50 per seat/month billed yearly ($10 monthly) with a 5-seat minimum and every feature, including billable rates, budgets, invoicing and native integrations. Custom plans start at 50 seats.
• Rating: 4.7/5 on G2 from 183 reviews; 4.7/5 on Capterra from 432 reviews

Everhour's pitch is that nobody has to change where the work lives. Its native integrations with Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, Jira, Linear, Monday, Notion, Trello, Wrike and others put the timer, the estimate and the logged hours on the task itself, and QuickBooks and Xero are native integrations on the accounting side. For an agency that plans every client project in Asana, that means the budget and the tracked hours sit where the project manager already looks.

The pricing shape matters for small teams. The five-seat minimum means a two-person studio pays for five, $42.50 a month on annual billing, and the free plan excludes integrations, which is the main reason to choose Everhour in the first place. Budget for Team if you need those integrations. If your projects do not live in one of the connected tools, a standalone tracker usually does the same job more simply.

What users say about Everhour

Teams that find the seat minimum steep can look at tools that replace Everhour, both lighter and heavier.

TimeCamp - unlimited free users, billing rates on the top plan

Best for: A larger team that wants free tracking for everyone and cheap paid seats, and does not mind rate-based billing sitting on the top plan.

• Pricing: Free for unlimited users and projects. Starter, Premium and Ultimate list at $3.99, $6.99 and $9.99 per user/month billed annually and were being shown discounted to $2.49, $3.99 and $4.99 (or $3.49, $4.99 and $6.99 month to month). Invoicing and Excel export start on Starter, billable time and budgets on Premium, and billing rates, timesheet approvals and expenses on Ultimate. An AI time tracker is billed separately by token usage on every plan, including Free.
• Rating: 4.7/5 on G2 from 391 reviews; 4.7/5 on Capterra from 599 reviews

TimeCamp gives the biggest free team on this list: unlimited users and projects with timesheets and desktop, web and mobile apps at no cost. From Premium, its desktop app can record the apps and websites people use to help fill in timesheets, and the top plan adds screenshots and unusual-activity reports, so check which of those your team is comfortable having switched on.

For client billing the tiers split awkwardly. Invoicing arrives on Starter and billable time on Premium, but billing rates, the thing most client invoices depend on, wait for Ultimate. In practice a client team lands on Ultimate, which is still inexpensive at the discounted rate, but compare the undiscounted list price too, because the discount is what the page shows today rather than a promised rate.

What users say about TimeCamp

For options without the activity tracking, the TimeCamp replacements we compared are sorted by what you want to keep.

Reporting and invoicing

Tools that turn reviewed hours into an invoice, with different budgets and approval options.

Harvest - the classic hours-to-invoice tool, if Flex billing suits you

Best for: A client-service team that invoices from tracked hours every month and wants clients, projects, invoices and payments in one tool.

• Pricing: Free for 1 seat and 2 projects, with invoicing included. Teams starts at $9 per seat/month billed annually ($11 monthly) with unlimited seats; Enterprise starts at $14 annually ($17.50 monthly). Both paid plans bill either as Flex, a per-seat rate plus usage charges for active projects, clients, tasks and invoicing above an included allowance, or as Unlimited, a fixed usage fee instead.
• Rating: 4.3/5 on G2 from 842 reviews; 4.5/5 on Capterra from 653 reviews

Harvest is the tool most client teams already know, and the reason is the invoice. Time and expenses are tracked against a client's projects, and at month end an invoice is built from them in a couple of steps. It also handles the money cases that simpler trackers skip: fixed fee projects, and retainers where a client pays up front and later invoices for tracked time draw down the balance. Accounting and payment integrations, including Xero, arrive on the Teams plan.

The catch is predictability. On Flex billing, usage charges are calculated from the previous period, so for new accounts they first appear at the second paid renewal, and Harvest's own help centre warns that the second bill can be much higher than the first. Unlimited billing swaps that for a fixed fee. Teams also leaves out things client teams often want: timesheet approvals, saved and shared reports, and profitability reporting are Enterprise features, and each person can keep only four custom reports on Teams. We explain the plan change in more detail in Harvest's Flex billing.

What users say about Harvest

If the pricing is what has you looking around, the Harvest head-to-head sets it against Timen feature by feature.

Clockify - the lowest list price for rates and invoices

Best for: Budget-conscious teams of more than five that want billable rates, invoices and timesheet approval on one inexpensive tier.

• Pricing: Free for up to 5 users, without billable rates, invoicing or CSV and Excel export. Basic is $3.99 per seat/month billed annually ($4.99 monthly) and adds billable rates. Standard is $5.49 ($6.99) and adds invoicing and timesheet approval. Pro is $7.99 ($9.99) and adds project budgets and estimates, GPS and optional activity monitoring. Enterprise is $11.99 ($14.99). Kiosk-only seats are priced separately.
• Rating: 4.5/5 on G2 from 203 reviews; 4.8/5 on Capterra from 9,268 reviews

Clockify's Standard tier is the cheapest paid path on this list at list prices, from project hours to an invoice: clients and projects, rates by project or person, invoices from tracked time and a submit-and-approve step for timesheets, for $5.49 a user billed annually. A ten-person team pays $54.90 a month on annual billing, where Harvest Teams or Toggl Starter start at $90 before anything else is added. Only TimeCamp's top plan undercuts it, and only while its current discount lasts.

The free plan is no longer the answer it used to be for client work. Since April 2026 it has been capped at five users, and billable rates, invoicing and spreadsheet exports all moved to paid tiers, so a client team pays from day one; we cover the details in what Clockify's free plan lost. Clockify has also added an optional activity-monitoring agent on Pro and above. It is optional, so not every Clockify team uses it, but it is worth knowing about if your team chose Clockify partly because it did not watch people.

What users say about Clockify

We compare the two directly in our Clockify head-to-head, including what the five-user cap changes.

Timen - free project hours, client reports and invoices

Best for: Client teams of any size that want project hours, client reports and invoices in one free tool, and do not need approvals, budgets or payroll.

• Pricing: Free, with every feature included, invoicing too, and no limit on users, projects or time entries.

Timen covers the path from project hours to a client invoice and not much beyond it: projects linked to clients, a billable rate on the project or the person, a billable switch on every entry, a timer, manual entries and a calendar view for spotting gaps, and reports you can filter by client, project, person, tag, billable status and invoiced status. Reports export as CSV or PDF, and an invoice can start from the report you just checked, then download as a PDF or go straight to QuickBooks Online, Xero, FreshBooks or Wave. There are iPhone and Android apps, the community-built TimenBar Mac menu bar app and a browser extension; invoicing happens on the web.

What it does not do matters just as much for a buyer. There is no formal timesheet submission and approval, no project budgets or estimates, no retainer tracking, no expenses module (an expense goes on an invoice as a manual line), and no attendance, GPS, screenshots or payroll. Invoices hand off to your accounting system rather than replacing it. If those gaps are fine, the worked example above shows the whole route from two client projects to a sent invoice.

If you are coming from Toggl, the Toggl head-to-head covers what carries over and what does not.

Timen has no third-party reviews yet; assess the workflow in your own account.

Paymo - project management and invoicing on one bill

Best for: A small agency that wants tasks, scheduling, time and invoices in one product, and is happy to pay per user for the whole package.

• Pricing: Free for 1 user, 1 client and 2 projects, with unlimited invoices. Solo is $5.90/month billed annually ($9.90 monthly) for 1 user, 3 clients and 5 projects, and adds flat rate and retainer projects. Plus is $10.90 per user/month annually ($15.90 monthly) and adds timesheet reports, project profitability and recurring invoices. Pro is $16.90 ($23.90) and adds timesheet approvals, Gantt charts and workload scheduling. New customers can get up to 40% off the first three months of a monthly plan.
• Rating: 4.6/5 on G2 from 594 reviews; 4.7/5 on Capterra from 686 reviews

Paymo is a project management tool that happens to bill well. Task lists, kanban boards and a calendar come first, time tracked on those tasks feeds straight into invoices, and from Solo you can set a project up as flat rate or as a retainer. Plus adds the reports and profitability view a client team needs, and Pro adds Gantt charts, workload scheduling and timesheet approvals for agencies that plan capacity in the same place.

The limits are about team size and scope. The free and Solo plans are single-user, so a team of three starts at Plus, $32.70 a month on annual billing. And for a team that only wants hours, a client report and an invoice, Paymo is more product than the job needs; the extra is worth paying for only if the tasks and schedules will live there too.

What users say about Paymo

If Paymo feels like too much, these lighter tools than Paymo keep the billing and drop the project management.

My Hours - project rates on a free plan for up to five

Best for: A team of up to five that wants client reports with a billable rate per project for free, and is ready to pay for Pro when invoicing or approvals become necessary.

• Pricing: Free for up to 5 active users, with unlimited projects and clients, a billable rate per project, non-billable time, detailed and timesheet reports and PDF download. Basic is $4 per user/month billed annually ($5 monthly). Pro is $8 ($9 monthly) and adds rates per user or task, labor costs, profit and loss, budgets, timesheet approval with an audit log, and invoicing of billable time. Enterprise is custom.
• Rating: 4.6/5 on G2 from 267 reviews; 4.8/5 on Capterra from 986 reviews

My Hours is quietly good at the client-report half of the job. The free plan keeps unlimited clients and projects, lets you set a rate on each project, separates non-billable time, and produces dashboard, detailed and timesheet reports you can download as PDF. The weekly timesheet grid suits people who prefer to log at the end of the day rather than run a timer, with the timer there for those who do.

The line is drawn at money beyond the project rate. Rates per person or task, cost and profit, budgets, approvals and invoicing all sit on Pro, so a team that bills different people at different rates or wants invoices from the tool will pay $8 a user. At that point it competes directly with Clockify Standard and Toggl Starter, and its advantage is mainly that the free plan let you run it properly first.

What users say about My Hours

Weighing several free plans at once? The free tracker limits comparison lines them up.

Attendance with a billing handoff

An attendance tool can fit when clock-ins matter more than invoice preparation.

Jibble - free for any headcount, but built around attendance

Best for: A business that needs clock-ins and attendance for its whole staff at no cost, bills some of that time to clients, and invoices from Xero or QuickBooks.

• Pricing: Free for unlimited users; Jibble's free offer covers desktop time tracking, mobile and web clock-ins, basic timesheets and Slack, Microsoft Teams and QuickBooks integrations. Paid plans are sold per seat, monthly or annually, with a 14-day trial, but Jibble no longer publishes a price list.
• Rating: 4.7/5 on G2 from 639 reviews; 4.8/5 on Capterra from 2,011 reviews

Jibble is attendance software first: clock-ins from phone, desktop or a shared kiosk, GPS and geofenced job sites, face recognition to stop buddy punching, and timesheets split into regular and overtime hours. Its billing page adds the client side: pick a project or client when clocking in, set an hourly rate for each team member, round entries, approve timesheets, and export or sync approved time to Xero, QuickBooks or Deel. A separate free invoice generator is on offer too, but it is a standalone tool rather than an invoice built from your entries.

For a client-service team the fit is narrower than the free price suggests. Rates are described per team member rather than per client or project, the invoice itself happens in your accounting software, and without a public price list you cannot tell in advance which billing features the free plan keeps. It is the right pick when attendance is the real problem and client billing is secondary; if billing is the main job, the tools above fit better.

What users say about Jibble

The fine print is covered in what Jibble's free plan covers.

Is a free plan enough for project time tracking?

Sometimes, but only if the free plan covers your team size and the billing step you actually use. Free tiers on this list range from one seat to unlimited users, and most cut out billable rates, invoicing or both. This is what each one gives a client team for nothing.

Test the free plan with your actual team size and billing workflow. A free timer may be enough when accounting handles invoices; it may not be enough when you need rates, shared reports and invoicing in the same tool.

Timen includes rates, reports and invoices without a seat limit. Its entry above explains the missing budgets, approval and retainer features so you can compare the whole workflow.

When do you need a PSA or accounting system instead?

When the questions stop being about hours on a project and start being about money across the business. A time tracker records the hours, turns them into a report and, in several of these tools, an invoice. It does not keep your books, recognise revenue, value work in progress or plan who is free next month.

Accounting software such as QuickBooks Online or Xero stays the system of record for invoices, payments, tax and the ledger in almost every case. The trackers here either create the invoice and send it there, or export hours for it to bill from, so check that handoff before anything else; we cover it in sending invoices to accounting. A professional services automation platform, or PSA, is the next step up. It earns its price when you need resource planning against utilization targets, budgets and forecasts across many projects, formal approval chains, retainers that cap hours automatically, purchase orders, or financials across several entities and currencies. Those requirements, rather than headcount alone, determine whether a PSA is worth the setup.

A different gap is task management rather than finance. If the real problem is that projects, tasks and deadlines live in chat, a project tool with time tracking built in, such as Breeze's project time tracking, may fit better than either a PSA or a standalone tracker.

What is the simplest way to start?

Try one client project from the first entry to the report or invoice you would send. Include a wrong entry that needs correcting and a check for previously billed hours. Choose the tool that completes those steps without unnecessary retyping.

In Timen, start with one client and project, record a work session and open the client report. If the work is billed hourly, create the invoice from that report. Check the result before using it for the rest of the team.