Time tracking for freelancers

Who this is for

Tickario is for people who sell their time to clients: freelance developers and designers, copywriters and translators, consultants, photographers and video editors, tutors and coaches. What they share is not a profession but a pattern. They work for several clients at once, each client may have a different rate or currency, and at some point someone asks, “how many hours was that?”

General-purpose time trackers are usually built for teams and managers. Tickario is built for the person doing the work and billing it: it starts with clients and rates rather than with employees and approvals.

Setup: ten minutes, once

1. Sign in with your email. There is no password: you receive a one-time link, and the first sign-in creates your account.
2. Add your clients. Give each a name, an optional logo and, if they pay one rate for everything, a rate and a currency.
3. Add projects under each client. A project can use the client’s rate or have its own, with its own currency.
4. In Settings, pick your default currency, the day your week starts and your interface language.
5. Optional: turn on idle detection and choose how many hours before auto-stop.

That is the whole setup. From then on, starting work is one action: type what you are doing, choose the project and press start.

A working week

The example below uses invented numbers to show the flow, not real data.

Monday: plan in the calendar, start from a task

You put the week’s work into the calendar as tasks, some with a time and a reminder. When it is time to start, you press play on the task. The timer begins with the project, title and client already filled in, and the time you track is added up on the task, so you can see how long a task really took.

Tuesday: two clients at once

A build is running for one client and a call comes in from another. You start a second timer for the second client. Tickario allows two running timers, as long as they are for different clients, so each client is billed for their own time and never twice for the same minutes.

Wednesday: the interruption you did not log

You stepped away from the screen during a timer. With idle detection on, Tickario asks when you return whether to subtract the time you were away. If you forgot a timer overnight, auto-stop would have stopped it after the number of hours you chose and emailed you.

Thursday: fixing a mistake

A call ran over and you meant to log it as two items. You split the entry at the right moment, edit the second part and move on. Every entry can be edited, duplicated, split or resumed.

Friday: the report

You open Reports, choose last week and the client, check the Detail view, and either export the PDF or create a share link that lasts seven days. If the client reads another language, you choose it for the report. The same week, across all clients, is visible in totals per currency on the dashboard.

Money across clients and currencies

A typical freelance month mixes currencies: one client pays in dollars, another in euros, a third in pounds. Tickario keeps each rate in its own currency and never merges them silently into one number. Reports and the dashboard show totals per currency, plus an average rate and a weekly goal in hours so you can see whether your week is on track.

How different roles use it

What it is not

Tickario does not send invoices, calculate taxes or manage teams. It tracks time, attaches rates and produces reports. Shared workspaces are in development, so for now each account is one person. If that matches how you work, it is free, needs no credit card and takes a minute to start.