Accounting & Finance

Top-Rated Time and Expense Tracking Apps for Freelancers

Jan 25, 2018

As a freelancer, you probably have a to-do list a mile long. But you can make your life easier with our pick of the best time and expense tracking apps.

Karen McCandlessAnalyst

How long is your to-do list? It can seem endless when you're a freelancer buried under a mountain of tasks- going over briefs, interacting with clients, keeping your workspace organized, and that's not to mention the work itself.

On top of all that, you also have to calculate what you will invoice clients by tracking your time spent on each project.

This last part-time tracking- is where freelancers often run into trouble. It's a major barrier to invoicing and keeping track of earnings when you can't efficiently and accurately track time, and charge clients off the back of this.

To help ease this issue, we've put together this list of the best time tracking apps for freelancers. These apps bring together tools to help you keep track of the no-fun bits, including tracking time, reporting on projects, and invoicing.

Based on analysis of reviews on GetApp from time tracking expense software, here's an overview of the areas of the apps users like best, as well as those they feel could use improvement.

Please note: The feedback given in each of the "Common user feedback trends" sections are the opinions of GetApp's reviewers, and do not represent the opinion of GetApp. Read more about our methodology at the bottom of this article.

TSheets

Tsheets allows you to track time on any device (including through Android and iPhone mobile apps, which is something other apps in this list don't have) and use this information to generate invoices and bill clients.

The app allows you to generate reports using real-time data, and apply filters such as sort by date, payroll period, project(s), and job code.

What do users like about TSheets?

  • It's easy to create and read time sheets​.

  • Businesses can directly import timesheet details of freelancers from their accounting system , and then use that data to generate their payroll.

  • TSheets syncs with external accounting and payroll systems, with reporting and linking to Quickbooks being a highlight.

  • Users commented that TSheets' service agents are helpful, understand their problems and then quickly offer quality support.

What do Tsheets users think could be improved?

  • Tsheets needs to provide better onboarding videos and webinars to help users get up to speed. Although the company provides good customer support, the initial training sessions are not up-to scratch, which means it take a while to learn.

  • Reporting could be more detailed.

Why should freelancers consider buying TSheets?

TSheets is useful for freelancers, as it is free for single users and offers per user based subscription pricing for more than one user.

Everhour

Everhour provides time tracking, reporting, invoicing, and budgeting, capabilities. To track time, you just have to press start and stop, although you can also record time manually. The app includes the feature to generate invoices in a few clicks.

Common user feedback trends

What do users like about Everhour?

  • With Everhour, freelancers can break projects into sections, subsections, and independent tasks, while capturing the time spent on each and every step. This gives a holistic view of the entire project time, and enables users to calculate billable and non-billable hours.

  • Everhour integrates seamlessly with lots of project management and collaboration software, such as Asana , Trello and Basecamp , allowing users to track time directly from within these third-party applications.

  • Most users liked its responsive interface with dynamic reporting capabilities that provides an enhanced user experience when it comes to day-to-day reporting of key metrics.

  • Users reported that their customer support had a good response time and were able to easily solve problems issue solving capabilities.

  • Users like Everhour's multi-platform time tracking capability, which allows them to track time spent on a task through third-party application plugins such as Asana and Trello, or via a browser extension.

What do Everhour users think could be improved?

  • Improve the setup of new users or projects, as the system takes some time to sync details with the back-end data.

  • Add the option to add more customization to Excel reports and dynamically link the HTML reports to the ongoing activity.

  • The addition of a mobile app.

  • Cheaper plans for solo users (e.g. freelancers).

  • Timer continues to run when the user switches off their computer but forgets to turn off the app. No rule-based timer management feature available yet.

  • Additional integration with business applications like ERP and accounting.

  • It offers dashboard for individual users to monitor their tasks, but lacks any project-level or team-level dashboard for end-to-end reporting.

Why should freelancers consider buying Everhour?

Everhour is available on a per-user-per-month subscription basis, making it a convenient option for solo users looking for a web-based project time tracking and invoicing solution. It includes a 14-day free trial.

Timesheets.com

Timesheets not only allows you to record hourly time worked, as well as working out job costing, it also enables you to record and bill for mileage and expenses. It comes with customizable reporting, and the ability to export data in various different formats.

Common user feedback trends

What do users like about Timesheets?

  • Useful for tracking working hours and generating accurate invoices from that information.

  • Responsive customer service.

  • Seamless integration with Quickbooks and other accounting solutions to gather payroll data and generate financial reports.

  • Ability to track working hours in decimal hour , actual hour and minute format.

What do Timesheets users think could be improved?

  • Addition of a mobile app.

  • Free plan for individual users.

  • Learning curve is slow, especially when a user is not tech savvy. Timesheets needs to create better video tutorials and onboarding sessions for new users.

  • Interface looks old and clunky and needs to be redesigned to look more modern.

Why should freelancers consider buying Timesheets?

Timesheets is free for single users, but freelancers who require customer support (phone, chat, and email) can purchase a Support Package for $99 per year.

Timecamp

With Timecamp, you can not only track time and bill clients, but you can also measure the profitability of working on certain projects. It also comes with features to help measure your productivity and work out where you are wasting time.

What do users like about Timecamp?

  • Timecamp users can keep track of hours worked across different projects, generate a summary report, and manage and report their billable hours from there, as well as export the report to Excel.

  • The app's dashboard offers drill down capabilities to view specific details within a project.

  • Users can build activity logs for a set period of time, and track time spent on all their work during that period.

  • There are a lot of third-party integrations available via the API.

  • The interface is intuitive and easy to understand, which means you can get up and running quickly.

What do Timecamp users think could be improved?

  • Better tools to break-down projects into sub tasks, and then track time spent on each sub-task.

  • Users are restricted to use the prebuilt invoice and reporting templates. It would be useful to have customizable templates that users can design them.

  • Improve integration with third-party apps.

  • The free version has limited features.

Why should freelancers consider buying Timecamp?

The basic version of Timecamp is free, which makes it suitable for solo users. Timecamp also offers a specific package for remote workers and contractors.

Next steps

These are just some of the top-rate time tracking and expense apps that are suitable for freelancers. For more help with choosing the right app for your growing freelance business, check out these resources :

Methodology

The solutions highlighted in this article are the time tracking apps that have the highest average overall user rating at the time of writing this article (January 2018).

We evaluated the platforms based on approximately 3,791 reviews in the past calendar year on from GetApp, as well as our sister sites Software Advice, and Capterra.

Below is the process we used

  • We shortlisted those products that had 4+ out of five stars with a minimum of 20 user reviews.

  • From that list, we only considered those apps that have a listing on GetApp. we considered only those which are listed on GetApp.​

  • The "common user feedback" sections include "what users like" and "user recommended improvements" for each product, based on feedback from users who left reviews.

  • The "who should consider this software" section is a summary of analysis conducted on the general comments from software users. This section highlights the most popular features of the software product, and recommends who should consider buying that product and why.

About the author

Karen McCandless

Analyst