Time tracking software for agencies
and bill for both
Your team's hours and your clients' email are the same business, and most agencies run them in two systems that never reconcile. Hour Cap keeps client requests, the time spent on them, every retainer cap and the Xero invoice in one place.
All features free for 7 days. No credit card needed.
Morning. Two customers rang this week to say their Amex card bounced at checkout. Visa goes through fine. Can someone take a look before the weekend sale?
Hi Priya, found it. Amex was failing the address check on the new gateway rules. Fixed and tested both cards this morning, so you are clear for the sale.
Five places an agency loses money
A solo consultant tracks their own hours against one rate. An agency has several people, several rates and several tools, and the gaps between them are where the month disappears.
Five people, three projects each, all on different rates
Somebody has to know which rate applies where, and if that somebody is a person rather than the software, they will get it wrong on an invoice sooner or later.
The requests that arrive in one person's mailbox
A client emails their account manager. It gets answered between two other jobs, or it stalls for three days because that person is on leave. Either way it reaches no timesheet, and those hours are rarely billed.
Half a dozen retainers on cycles that do not line up
None of them match calendar months, and nobody can see which ones are about to overrun until the period has already closed.
Junior entries going straight to a client
"Worked on Acme" lands on an invoice because nobody read it first, and the client reads it before you do.
A billing run rebuilt by hand
One person spends a day re-keying line items into Xero, and writes off anything they cannot reconstruct.
A timer on its own fixes none of these. What fixes them is giving each part of the agency the right view: quick capture for the people doing the work, live budgets for the people running the accounts, and one shared place for everything a client sends you.
One loop, four stages
The request arrives, the hours build against a cap, a manager reviews them, and the month closes as a draft in Xero. Nothing gets reconciled between tools, because there is only one.
Forward your support address and client mail lands in a shared inbox, matched to the client from your synced Xero contacts. Everyone with a seat can see and answer it, so nothing stalls in one mailbox while somebody is away.
Timers and manual entries against clients and projects, with descriptions written while the work is fresh. Time logged from a conversation counts the same as project work, and every retainer fills in real time.
Members submit weekly. Approvers accept or reject with a reason. Only approved entries are invoiceable, so nothing reaches a client that somebody else has not read.
Approved hours push to Xero as a draft invoice with your descriptions as the line item text, grouped per entry, project, date or member. You approve and send from Xero as you do now.
Stage one is the Customer Support Inbox add-on at $12 a seat, and only for the people who answer client mail. Everything else is on the plan.
Client email is agency work too
Ask an agency where its unbilled hours go and it is rarely delivery. It is the request that landed in one account manager's mailbox, and the twenty minutes nobody was going to open a timesheet to record.
Forward your support address and that mail lands in a shared inbox that already knows your clients, your rates and your retainers. Your team answers as the agency and logs the hour without leaving the thread.
- Everyone with a seat sees the whole inbox, so requests stop stalling while somebody is on leave
- Senders matched to the clients synced from your Xero contacts, so mail arrives already filed
- The retainer cap visible beside the conversation, while somebody decides how much effort to give
- Assignment, snoozing, internal notes, and a view of who is still waiting on you
- Replies go out from your own domain, under your agency name
An add-on at $12 per seat per month, and only for the people who answer client mail. Included in your trial.
Retainer visibility across the whole book
Most retainer overruns are a visibility problem, not a delivery problem. Your team did not know they were close to the cap because nobody could see it in one place. Hour Cap shows every active retainer with current usage, period progress and alert state on a single dashboard.
- Mixed billing cycles: weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, custom
- Per-retainer alert thresholds, so you hear about it at 80%
- Support hours counted against the cap alongside project work
- Budgets auto-reset at the end of each period
- Invoice the current period directly from the invoice wizard
Approvals built into the invoicing flow
Mark which members need review and who reviews them. Senior people submit and ship; juniors and contractors get a pass over their entries first. Only approved time is invoiceable, so nothing in flight can reach a client by accident.
- A requires-approval flag per member, with an assigned approver
- Approve or reject with a written reason the submitter can act on
- Approved entries lock, so the audit trail stays clean
- Support conversations go through the same weekly review
- The full approvals workflow is on the Business plan
Acme Corp · Rebuilt the checkout flow; tested across browsers.
Northwind · Support thread: Amex checkout failures.
Acme Corp · "Worked on stuff". Needs detail.
Billable rates that cascade sensibly
Setting a separate rate on every project for every team member does not scale. Hour Cap resolves rates in order: project rate first if set, then member rate, then organisation default. Configure the exceptions, not the rules.
If a client negotiated a flat rate across the project, set it once on the project and everyone tracking time there inherits it. If a senior consultant bills $200/hr everywhere else, set that on the member. The defaults handle the rest.
Most specific rate wins. Project beats member beats organisation default.
Push to Xero as a draft
One draft per client, with hours, rates, descriptions, tax rates and branding theme already in place. Your existing Xero send flow takes over from there, so nothing about how the agency invoices has to change.
- Line items grouped per entry, project, date, or team member
- Support hours appear in the same rollup as project work
- Invoiced entries lock automatically, so nothing is billed twice
- Voiding in Xero releases the entries again
Three drafts in Xero. Review and send.
Common questions
What is the best time tracking software for agencies?
Agencies need three things from time tracking: team-wide capture with rate variation, retainer and project budgets that show usage in real time, and invoicing that does not require retyping line items. A fourth thing usually goes unmentioned, which is capturing the client correspondence that no timesheet ever sees. For agencies using Xero, Hour Cap covers all four without bolting on a separate help desk or invoicing tool.
How do agencies track billable hours across a team?
Each member logs their own time against clients and projects. Rates cascade from the organisation default to member overrides to project overrides, so an account manager and a developer can both work on the same project at different rates without manual line-by-line edits.
How do we capture the time our account managers spend on client email?
With the Customer Support Inbox add-on, client mail is forwarded into Hour Cap and lands in a shared inbox matched to the client from your synced Xero contacts. Whoever answers starts a timer or logs a duration from the conversation itself, so those hours reach the same timesheet, the same retainer cap and the same invoice as project work. Without it, correspondence is the category most often missing from an agency invoice.
How do I approve timesheets before they go on invoices?
Configure approval requirements per member. Their entries enter an unsubmitted state, they submit weekly timesheets to their approver, and only approved entries become invoiceable. Locked entries cannot be edited or deleted after approval, so the audit trail is clean. Time logged from a support conversation is an ordinary entry and goes through the same review.
Can I track multiple retainers for different clients?
Yes. Set up a retainer per client with its own hours budget and billing period (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, or custom). Budgets auto-reset at the end of each period. Usage shows in real time so account managers see when a client is close to the cap.
Does everyone in the agency need a support inbox seat?
No, and that is the point of it being an add-on rather than a plan tier. You choose who gets a seat and pay $12 a month for each person who answers client mail, with the first seat included on a Business plan. Everybody else keeps tracking time as normal.
How is agency time tracking different from time tracking for consultants?
Agencies have a team rather than a single biller, so they need approvals, rate cascades, per-member tracking, and a shared place for client requests rather than five separate mailboxes. Consultants usually need none of that. The underlying time and billing flow is the same, but agencies sit on the Business plan because of approvals, activity logging, and higher seat counts.
Does Hour Cap handle utilisation reporting?
Yes. Hour Cap reports billable and non-billable hours per member, per project, and per client. Revenue reports show invoiced amounts by period. The data is filterable so you can answer specific questions without exporting CSVs.
Free calculators for agencies
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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 JonathanGet the whole month onto the invoice
Every hour your agency gives a client, including the ones spent answering them. All features free for 7 days.