If your agency is one person, most of this category is overhead.
Agency time tracking software is built around a team: seats, roles, approval flows, capacity planning and a utilisation dashboard for someone to review. All of it exists to move information between people.
An agency of one has no handoffs. HourToBill tracks hours against a client and turns the month into an itemised PDF invoice, and does nothing else. If you employ people, this page will tell you to look elsewhere rather than sell you something that will not fit.
A working example timer, currently running, billing Northgate Retail at $95.00 an hour.
Go on, press stop. It is the real thing.
Team features are a cost when there is no team.
Every feature in agency software has a person on the other end of it. Approvals exist because someone reviews someone else’s timesheet. Roles and permissions exist because not everyone should see the rates. Capacity planning exists because work has to be allocated. Utilisation targets exist because a principal is measuring a team’s billable ratio.
Run a studio alone and each of those becomes a form you fill in for an audience of one, priced per seat for a seat count of one. Worse, the tool asks you to set up a project structure before it will accept a single hour, and on a busy Thursday you will decline and log nothing at all.
What survives is small: which client, what did I do, how long, and has it been billed. That is a client record with a running meter and an invoice at the end. The number worth glancing at is not utilisation, it is unbilled value, which sits on the screen at all times here.
Agency tools against a single-operator one.
Harvest, Productive.io, Rocketlane and Toggl Track all do this well for a team. The split is entirely about headcount.
| What you get elsewhere | What you get here |
|---|---|
| Per-seat pricing, where one seat is the awkward edge case of the plan. | $12 a month flat. There is no seat concept to be the edge case of. |
| Utilisation, capacity and billable-ratio dashboards for reviewing a team. | One number: unbilled hours and what they are worth, per client. |
| Projects, tasks and approval flows to be configured before the first hour. | Add a client, start the timer. There is no project layer to configure. |
| Reporting suites built so a principal can review other people’s time. | A dated list of what you did, filterable by client and by unbilled. |
| Invoicing as a module, often on a higher tier. | The invoice is the reason the timer exists, and it is in the one plan. |
If you have staff, close this tab.
There are no seats, no second logins, no approvals and no way to see anyone else’s hours. The product is one account for one person. If you have two employees, or a contractor whose time you bill on, nothing here will work and no roadmap item will change that: it is the design, not a missing feature.
There is also no client portal, no retainer burn-down, no budget-against-actuals and no profitability report per engagement. Those are genuinely useful to an agency with a team and this has none of them.
The honest audience for this page is the person who calls themselves an agency because that is what the invoice says, and who is in fact the whole company. If that is you, the trial ends with a real invoice and takes about five minutes.
Before you buy.
Can I add my team?
No. One account is one person, with no seats and no second login. If you need to track anyone else’s hours, Harvest or Productive.io are the right tools and this is not.
Does it show utilisation?
No. It shows hours tracked and, more usefully for one person, the value of hours not yet invoiced. Utilisation is a management measure and there is nobody here to manage.
Can I track against projects or retainers?
There is one level, the client. No projects, no budgets and no retainer burn-down. Many one-person studios use one client record per engagement, which works but is not the same thing.
What if I grow and hire someone?
Then you have outgrown this and should move. Export everything as CSV and download your invoice PDFs, both of which keep working whatever you decide about the subscription.
Can I bill different rates for different clients?
Yes. Rate, currency, tax rate, terms and billing increment all sit on the client record and every hour inherits them.
Do clients get a portal?
No. They get a PDF invoice with your details, itemised hours and a payment link if you add one. In practice that is what most clients of a one-person studio want.