Time tracking software for consultants
and for the email about it
Know what each client is really paying you per hour. Hour Cap captures hourly, retainer and fixed-price work with the detail clients want to see, gives you one place for the requests they send, and pushes the lot to Xero as a draft invoice.
Free plan for solo consultants. No credit card needed.
Hi, sorry to pile on. Could we swap the hero image, fix the typo on the pricing page, and add the new team member? Nothing urgent but ideally before Friday.
All three are done and live. The team member card needed a headshot crop to match the others, so I have done that too. Shout if anything looks off.
Consultant time tracking is its own thing
Most time trackers were built for agencies, employees, or productivity nerds. Working for yourself, the problems are different, and the biggest one is that every minute spent on admin is a minute you are not billing for.
Which is why the correspondence never gets tracked: recording it costs more than doing it.
- Clients want to see what they are paying for, not a single line of "Consulting".
- Rates often vary by client, and sometimes by project within the same client.
- One client is on a retainer, another on a fixed-price scope, another purely hourly.
- Requests arrive in your personal inbox and get answered between other jobs.
- You are billing yourself, so anything that takes more than five minutes a week is friction.
One loop, three stages
The request arrives, the hours build against whatever you agreed, and the month closes as a draft in Xero. No second tool to reconcile against.
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Receive
Client requests land in one place
Forward your work address and client mail arrives in Hour Cap, matched to the client whose rate is already set. Answering it and recording it become one action instead of two.
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Track
Hours build with the description attached
Timer or manual entry, against hourly, retainer or fixed-price work. Write the two sentences while it is fresh, because that text is what the client reads on the invoice.
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Bill
One draft per client in Xero
Pick the grouping, push, review in Xero and send. Hours, rates, descriptions and tax arrive filled in, and invoiced entries lock so nothing goes out twice.
Stage one is the Customer Support Inbox add-on, one seat at $12 a month. Tracking and Xero invoicing are on the plan.
The other half of the work is email
A client emails on a Tuesday asking for three small changes. You read it properly, you make the changes, you write back explaining what you did. Forty minutes, and it never becomes a line on anything, because stopping to log it would have taken almost as long as the reply.
Solo, there is nobody to hand that to. Requests land in your personal inbox, get answered between jobs, and at month end the invoice shows the project work and none of the correspondence around it.
- Forward your work address and client email lands where your rates already are
- Start a timer or log a duration from the conversation, prefilled with the client
- The retainer meter sits beside the thread, so you can see what answering costs the cap
- Replies go out under your own name, from your own domain
- The hour reaches the same timesheet, and the same Xero invoice, as everything else
One seat at $12 per month, included in your trial.
Roughly a day and a half a month, at your rate.
Tracking that doesn't take over your day
Four habits that take the friction out of consultant time tracking. None are software-specific, but they are easier when your tool supports them.
Capture while context is fresh
Stop reconstructing your week from calendar invites on a Friday afternoon. Start the timer when you start, or log a manual entry the moment you stop. Five minutes of accurate detail beats an hour of guessing.
Write descriptions for the invoice
Your future client is going to read this. Skip the cryptic abbreviations and note the outcome, not just the activity: "Fixed checkout error caused by stale session token" reads better than "Bug fix".
Separate billable from non-billable
Admin, sales calls and proposal writing are real work but they are not billable. Track them so you know where the week went, but tag them clearly so they never reach an invoice by accident.
Set your rate at the right level
A single global rate works with one engagement. Most people need overrides per client and per project. Set the default, then override only where it differs.
Your description is the invoice line
Getting paid promptly comes down to three things: the client understanding what they are paying for, the invoice being easy to approve, and you not losing track of which hours have already been billed. All three come out of the description field.
- Multi-line descriptions that reach Xero verbatim, line breaks and all
- Group per entry for full detail, or per project for a tidy summary
- Invoiced entries lock automatically, so nothing is billed twice
- Voiding in Xero releases them again
Swapped the hero image, corrected the pricing page typo, and added the new team member card.
Cropped the headshot to match the existing team photos and checked the layout on mobile.
Swapped the hero image, corrected the pricing page typo, and added the new team member card.
Cropped the headshot to match the existing team photos and checked the layout on mobile.
Common questions
How do I track billable hours as a consultant?
Set up a client and a project, then capture time against them as you work. Use a timer for focused sessions and manual entry to backfill anything you forgot. Write the description while the work is fresh, not at the end of the week, because that text becomes the invoice line the client reads.
What is the best billing software for freelance consultants?
For consultants who use Xero, the best setup is time and billing software that pushes tracked time straight to Xero as draft invoices. That keeps Xero as the system of record for finance and avoids rewriting line items by hand. Hour Cap is built around exactly that flow.
How do I bill for the time I spend answering client emails?
Solo, this is the hardest category to capture, because there is nobody to hand a request to and no reason to open a second application for a ten-minute reply. The Customer Support Inbox add-on forwards your client mail into Hour Cap, so the timer and the client are already in front of you when you answer. Those hours reach the same invoice as project work.
How do I bill clients for hourly work?
Decide your rate per client or project, track hours with descriptions of the work, choose how line items should group on the invoice (per entry, per project, per date, or per person), and push the invoice to your accounting tool as a draft. Review it there and send.
How is consultant time tracking different from agency time tracking?
Consultants usually bill in their own name with simpler rate structures, mix retainer, hourly, and fixed-price work in one engagement, and care less about utilisation reporting than about clean invoices clients accept first time. They also have nobody to delegate client correspondence to, which makes unbilled email a larger share of the week than it is in an agency.
Do I still need accounting software if I use a time tracker?
Yes. A time tracker captures hours and produces invoices; accounting software like Xero records the invoice as revenue, tracks payment status, and handles tax. Hour Cap pushes draft invoices to Xero so you keep Xero as the source of truth for your books.
How do I track time for a monthly retainer?
Set a retainer with an hours budget and a billing period (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, or custom). Track time against the retainer client as usual. Hour Cap resets the budget at the end of each period and shows usage in real time, so you know where you stand before the period closes.
Is the support inbox worth it for one person?
It depends on how much of your week arrives as email. If clients mostly book calls and you work from a scoped brief, probably not. If your day is punctuated by requests you answer between jobs, it will likely pay for itself, because it turns the least-tracked part of your week into something you can put on an invoice. It is one seat at $12 a month, and included in your trial so you can find out.
Free calculators for consultants
See all free tools →Work out what to charge, what you actually earn per hour, and how much of your week is billable.
Freelance Rate Calculator
Work out the hourly rate you need from target income, tax and overhead.
Open calculatorEffective Hourly Rate Calculator
See what your headline rate is really worth after non-billable time.
Open calculatorBillable Utilization Calculator
Find your utilization rate and the revenue you are leaving on the table.
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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 JonathanTrack hours. Answer clients. Bill for both.
Free plan for solo consultants, and every feature unlocked for 7 days.