A spreadsheet time
tracking alternative
Replace your time tracking spreadsheet. Same flexibility. Real retainer budgets. Descriptions that flow to Xero. No more rebuilding tabs every quarter.
Setup takes minutes if you already know your rates.
Updates as the team logs time. No refresh button.
The spreadsheet started fine. It's getting harder.
You built it because nothing on the market fit your billing model. It did the job for a long time, and lately it has been doing it less well.
The flexibility you kept the spreadsheet for is still there in Hour Cap, without the parts that break.
- You only see retainer usage when you open the sheet, which is usually after a problem.
- Descriptions get copy-pasted into Xero, with line breaks mangled, every billing day.
- Someone clobbered a formula. Nobody noticed until April.
- There is no row for the client emails anyone answered, and there never will be.
- A new team member needs the rates explained. Then explained again.
What you get back when you leave the sheet
Live numbers instead of Friday-afternoon ones, a description field built for invoices, and nothing that breaks when somebody types in the wrong cell.
Numbers that update as time is logged
Retainer usage, project burn-down and billable totals all update as the team logs time. Nobody has to refresh the sheet or maintain the formulas.
- Real-time retainer usage with auto-reset per period
- Project budgets with alert thresholds
- Time and revenue reports without writing formulas
A description field built for invoices
Spreadsheet cells were never designed to hold an invoice description. Hour Cap gives every entry a multi-line, paragraph-style field, pushed to Xero invoice lines verbatim.
Truncated cell. Manual paste into Xero. Line breaks lost.
Rebuilt the checkout flow to recover from expired session tokens.
Tested across browsers and deployed to staging. Production scheduled for tomorrow.
Multi-line. Pushed to Xero verbatim. No paste.
No broken formulas, no version chaos
Rates live in one place. Retainers reset on their own. Audit logs show who edited what. A new team member onboards in five minutes instead of an hour-long sheet walkthrough.
And one column a sheet was never going to have: the time spent answering clients, if you add the Customer Support Inbox. Nobody alt-tabs to a spreadsheet to log four minutes of replying, which is why those hours have never been in yours.
- Centralised rates with cascade resolution
- An audit log for every meaningful change
- Role-based access, with no shared editor account
Moving off the spreadsheet
Most sheets hold a dozen clients and a handful of rates, so this is shorter than it sounds.
-
Clients
Create them, or sync them from Xero
Five minutes if you have a dozen. If you are connected to Xero, the contacts come across and you pick which ones are clients.
-
Rates
Set them once, in one place
Organisation default, member overrides, project overrides. This is the tab of your sheet that people kept getting wrong, and it stops being a tab.
-
Today
Start tracking from now, not from January
Add the retainers and projects the sheet was modelling, cleaner this time, then track from today. Old entries stay where they are, because they are already invoiced.
What stops happening once the sheet is gone
Common questions
Why do people track time in spreadsheets?
Spreadsheets are flexible: you can model rates, retainer caps, billable versus non-billable, and any custom column you need. Most time trackers are too rigid. The cost is that spreadsheets do not link to your accounting tool, do not show real-time usage, and break the moment you add a team member or a new retainer cycle.
What is wrong with using a spreadsheet for billable hours?
Three things, mainly. First, you only know retainer usage when someone updates the sheet, usually at month-end. Second, descriptions get copy-pasted into Xero by hand. Third, errors are silent: one wrong cell can flow into an invoice that goes to a client.
How is Hour Cap different from a time tracking spreadsheet?
Same flexibility in the things that mattered (rates per client, retainer budgets, billable and non-billable, descriptions), but with real-time budget tracking, multi-line descriptions that go to Xero verbatim, and an invoice push that replaces the copy-paste step. You do not have to rebuild the model every quarter.
My spreadsheet has no row for client emails. Should it?
That is the usual gap, and it is a hard one to close in a sheet: nobody alt-tabs to a spreadsheet to log four minutes of replying. The Customer Support Inbox add-on handles it by putting the client mailbox inside Hour Cap, so the timer is already there when you answer. It is the one category a spreadsheet realistically cannot capture, whatever columns you add.
Can I import my existing spreadsheet?
There is no automatic import yet, but most spreadsheets only have a handful of clients and rates, so setup is fast: create the clients, set the rates, and start tracking from today. Historical entries do not usually need to come across, since they are already invoiced.
Do I still need a spreadsheet for anything?
For one-off analysis, sometimes. Hour Cap exposes time and revenue reports that cover the common cases (per client, per project, per period). For everything else, Hour Cap can export so you can pull data into a spreadsheet when you specifically need spreadsheet-shaped work.
Why I built Hour Cap
I'm Jonathan, a freelance web developer in Brisbane, Australia. After 15 years, I wanted my client work to run on one system instead of separate tools that didn't handle retainers or Xero, copy/paste errors, and time that never got invoiced. I needed one tool that handled retainers, fixed-price, and hourly projects, let me write proper multi-line descriptions, showed me what was actually profitable, and pushed straight to Xero as invoices. Nothing did all of it, so I built one. Today it is pivotal to my business: all my time tracking, invoice drafting, and profitability runs through Hour Cap, and it scales the same way for agencies and teams.
Independent and self-funded. When you email support, you reach the person who built it.
More about JonathanLeave the spreadsheet behind
The flexibility you built it for, without the fragility. Free to start, and Xero on any paid plan.