Ok, so I have actually used the same time tracker that I built back in 2017 for myself for the past 6 years. It is simple and I can do all the time tracking I need for all my clients. It works awesome and if you are a single person user, this solution is great and everyone has Excel so it is widely available to most people without any ongoing fees. I also like this solution better than web-based solutions that I've tried.
Template:
Why I like this?
- Easy to adjust billable rate for any given job or a job where you have multiple rates to be billed at.
- Easily see summary reports by month for a given client and the hours worked / amount billed.
- Provides a nice clear audit report of what you were doing and for how long, this actually has been great for me when I needed to negotiate and the client wanted to see my total billable history for a few years.
- The file is pretty lite and can be used for many thousands of rows. I am already up to 5,816 and it is running fine.
Want to build it yourself? here you go:
- Open a new Excel spreadsheet.
- In cell A1, type "Date" to label the first column.
- In cell B1, type "Start Time" to label the second column.
- In cell C1, type "End Time" to label the third column.
- In cell D1, type "Total Hours" to label the fourth column.
- Starting from row 2, enter the date of each day you want to track time for in column A.
- In column B, enter the start time of each activity you want to track. You can use the format "hh:mm AM/PM" (e.g., 09:30 AM).
- In column C, enter the end time of each activity. Use the same time format as above.
- In column D, enter the formula "=C2-B2" to calculate the total hours worked for each day. This formula subtracts the start time from the end time and returns the result in decimal format (e.g., 8.5 for 8 and a half hours).
- Repeat steps 7-9 for each day you want to track time for.
Note, in mine I put some advanced macros and reporting for 2-week periods and monthly summaries in total and by client.
Article found in Accounting and Finance.
