You are one person. You do not need a Gantt chart.
Boards, dependencies, capacity planning and approval flows all exist to coordinate people who can’t just ask each other. You can ask yourself.
What a solo consultant has to manage is the gap between work done and money received. HourToBill manages exactly that gap and refuses everything else.
A working example timer, currently running, billing Northgate Retail at $95.00 an hour.
Go on, press stop. It is the real thing.
It is a record-keeping problem, not a coordination one.
When a solo consultant goes looking for project management software, the underlying question is almost never “how do I sequence this work”. It is one of three others: what have I actually done for this client, how much of it is unbilled, and how do I turn that into something they can pay.
Answering those with Asana or Monday means maintaining a task structure whose only reader is you, and still leaving the invoice to a separate tool at the end of the month. Here one object answers all three. A time entry has a client, a date, a description, an hourly rate and a billed flag. Filter by client and you have the engagement history. Filter by unbilled and you have the amount owed to you. Select a period and you have the invoice.
This list is not a roadmap.
- A timer you start against a client
- Manual entries for the hours you forgot to time
- Per-client hourly rate, currency and payment terms
- Billing increments of 6, 15, 30 or 60 minutes
- A running total of what is unbilled
- A PDF invoice with every hour itemised
- Your own logo on the invoice
- CSV export of every entry and every invoice
- Your own payment link on the invoice, so clients can pay in one click
Task boards, subtasks, dependenciesTeam members, seats, permissionsClient portals nobody logs intoCapacity planning and utilisation targetsA deal pipeline with stages and a forecastEmail sequences and follow-up nudgesAn upgrade prompt on the feature you need
Before you buy.
Do solo consultants need project management software?
Usually less of it than they think. Project management software solves coordination between people. Working alone you have no coordination problem, you have a record-keeping and billing problem: what did I do for this client, and has it been paid for.
Is HourToBill a project management tool?
No, and it is worth being direct about that. There are no tasks, boards, dependencies or Gantt charts. It tracks the work you did for each client and turns it into an invoice. If you need to assign work to other people, use a real project management tool.
How do I track client work without projects and tasks?
Every time entry carries a client and a description, so the description is your record of the work. Filter by client and the whole engagement reads as a dated list of what was done, what it cost, and whether it has been billed.
What about fixed-price engagements?
Track the hours anyway. The tracked total then tells you your effective hourly rate on that engagement, which is the number that decides whether to quote that way again.
Can I see how much unbilled work is sitting on a client?
Yes. Each client shows unbilled hours and what they are worth at that client’s rate, which is the closest thing a solo consultant has to a pipeline view.
When should I use something bigger?
When you assign work to subcontractors, when a client expects to watch a board move, when delivery depends on sequencing so a slipped date cascades, or when you need resource planning across concurrent engagements. Then a real project tool is the right answer.