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.
The spreadsheet started fine. It's getting harder.
You built it because nothing on the market fit your billing model. It does the job. Mostly. Lately, less.
- 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.
- A new team member needs the rates explained. Then explained again.
The flexibility you kept the spreadsheet for is still there in Hour Cap. The fragility isn't.
What you get back when you leave the sheet
Live numbers, not Friday-afternoon numbers
Retainer usage, project burn-down, billable totals all update as the team logs time. No-one has to refresh the sheet. No-one has to update the formulas.
- Real-time retainer usage with auto-reset per period
- Project budgets with alert thresholds
- Time and revenue reports without writing formulas
Updates as the team logs time. No refresh button.
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.
Descriptions that actually fit
Spreadsheet cells aren't designed for invoice descriptions. Hour Cap is. Multi-line, paragraph-style descriptions per entry, pushed to Xero invoice lines verbatim.
- Line breaks preserved end to end
- No more "looks fine in the sheet, mangled in Xero"
- Copy-paste step deleted from the workflow
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.
- Centralised rates with cascade resolution
- Audit log for every meaningful change
- Role-based access, no shared editor account
Moving off the spreadsheet, in an afternoon
Create the clients
Or sync them from Xero. Five minutes if you have a dozen.
Set the rates
Default, member overrides, project overrides. Done once.
Add retainers and projects
Replicate what's in the sheet. Cleaner this time.
Track from today
Old entries stay where they are. New entries start in Hour Cap.
Same flexibility, no spreadsheet
Free to try. Set up in minutes if you already know your rates.
What stops happening once the sheet is gone
No more "let me check the sheet"
Retainer usage is on the dashboard. Always current.
No copy-paste into Xero
Descriptions and line items push automatically.
No broken formulas
Calculations live in the app, not in cells someone could overwrite.
Onboarding in minutes
New team members log time without a sheet walkthrough.
Common questions
Why do people track time in spreadsheets?
Spreadsheets are flexible: you can model rates, retainer caps, billable vs non-billable, and any custom column you need. Most time trackers are too rigid. The cost is that spreadsheets don't link to your accounting tool, don't show real-time usage, and break the moment you add a team member or a new retainer cycle.
What's 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/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 don't have to rebuild the model every quarter.
Can I import my existing spreadsheet?
There's 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 don't usually need to come across, since they're 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.
Leave the spreadsheet behind
Free to start. Same flexibility, none of the fragility.