7 Best Time Tracking Software for Accountants

• Billing and invoicing: With over 85 currencies (Hubstaff supports only 25 and Harvest supports more than 100 via API), invoicing in 15 languages, and integrations with multiple payment providers, it’s easy to create an invoice that gets you paid, no matter where your client resides. Plus, it can track partial payments.
• Time tracking: Like most of the timekeeping software we evaluated, you can track time on desktop, via mobile, or with a widget on your browser.
• Project management: With Paymo, you can create projects and break them down into tasks. There are different task views to choose from, including list, calendar, board, table, and Gantt chart, making monitoring easy. You can even save projects as templates for future use or create repeatable tasks daily, weekly or monthly.
• Productivity tracking: Only TimeCamp and Paymo have automatic time tracking, which ensures that you don’t charge clients for unrelated tasks. The apps automatically capture the apps, programs, and websites used and assign them to the proper task and project. Paymo, TimeCamp, Time Doctor, and Hubstaff also help accountants check how they spend their working hours with productivity monitoring that shows the time spent on each app, website, or program.
• Job costing and reports: You can estimate costs and track expenses, even adding expenses by snapping receipts. You can set up live reports that automatically update when someone reviews them, so you don’t have to manually create them each time—no other provider mentioned this capability. You can share reports with clients as well.
• Integrations: Paymo integrates with calendar apps, Slack, QuickBooks, and a few other productivity apps. It does not integrate with payroll or POS apps, although it does integrate with Square as a payment processor.

• Smarter, streamlined time tracking: Like most of the software in this guide, Hubstaff works with desktop, mobile, and web apps. It can also record your time even when it is offline.
• Project management: You can create project budgets based on hours, bill rates, or pay rates. Hubstaff is unique in that it lets you create work orders as well, so you can keep the client information, team assignments, and a history of actions all in one place.
• Robust employee productivity tools: If you are worried about your team’s real-time performance, Hubstaff will help you remove unproductive time through its app, URL tracking, and idle time/inactivity warning. On the other hand, your employees’ work in progress will be monitored by capturing screenshots. Apart from Hubstaff, on our list, Time Doctor, Paymo, Trackabi, and Clockify also offer productivity tools.
• Client invoicing: With Hubstaff, you can track billable hours for invoicing. You can invoice your clients based on the time your team has tracked in Hubstaff, as well as add your own line items. The system will alert you when you’re nearing a budget limit.
• Payroll management: You can automatically process payroll by just inputting your employees’ hourly rate and schedule (weekly, biweekly, monthly). Hubstaff does not support overtime calculations; you’ll have to calculate manually. For the free plan, you export payroll information to send payments manually.

Read our Hubstaff review

• Flexible time tracking: Clockify’s time tracking tool is accessible via computers, mobile devices (iOS and Android), and web browsers. It also has browser extensions for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox.
• Project management: With Clockify, you can monitor your work hours and progress on every project. You can even break projects down by task, categorize time by job type, and track the status of each task. Its management tools are strong, but if you need more, consider Paymo, which has Gantt charts and Kanban boards.
• Detailed reporting and analytics: Clockify provides you with a visual time breakdown and customizable reports that you can share with others via a link and/or export as PDF, CSV, and Excel files. With this feature, you can set up project estimates for both time and costs, and then check your budget versus the actuals. You can even compare your labor costs against the amount you charge clients. Unlike others on our list, however, you need to export data to create custom reports.
• Productivity tools: Clockify offers timer reminders on a daily and weekly basis through emails to employees, managers, and administrators. Like Hubstaff, Time Doctor, and Trackabi, It has a screenshot tool (to update clients on work progress), idle detection, a Pomodoro timer (which separates work intervals with short breaks), and auto tracker. Like Paymo and Trackabi, it’s an extremely feature-rich timekeeping software for productivity.
• Invoicing: Clockify only offers this feature in paid plans. For Standard plan users, billable hours can be imported into its invoicing tool. The invoices that are generated in Clockify can be downloaded as PDF documents that you can email to clients. You can also edit invoices, as long as they haven’t been paid by the client.
• Advanced administrative features: With the paid plans, you can conduct time audits, round time up or down, manually change times for an employee, set up time sheet reminders, schedule reports, and set up budgets and job estimates.

Read our Clockify review

• Invoicing: Like many on our list, it generates invoices and tracks payments. It especially stands out because it integrates with Stripe and PayPal, so your clients can easily pay online or from their email. Only Paymo has more payment integrations. You can copy your payments to QuickBooks or Xero for accounting.
• Time tracking: Harvest itself says it’s a “lightweight” tracking experience. You can track employee hours with timers on your desktop and mobile or enter them at once. Harvest also has codes for adding a Harvest timer button, which lets you track time when working with a particular software.
• Project costs and tracking: You can track employee hours and check expenses and labor against budgets. The team view (with the paid plan) lets you see when an employee is over their allotted time. Reports let you dig into the details of how employee time is spent. You can also edit and approve time sheets.
• Integrations: Harvest integrates mostly with product management tools (like Asana), Slack, calendar apps, and browser extensions.

Read our Harvest review

• Time tracking gamification: Trackabi is unique in that it lets you use “karma points” and achievements to improve employee engagement. Like all other providers in this list, you can monitor and time spent on various projects and tasks. Users can either use the timer to log time manually, which is automatically recorded in timesheets.
• Custom reports: You can generate reports from the time sheets and customize them by adding your own fields. You can then share these reports via external links or export them to Excel or PDF.
• Project management: Users can create teams and assign them to projects. You can also edit user roles and access privileges to ensure that only authorized users can edit project-related information.
• Employee monitoring: If you subscribe to its Business Plus plan, the app takes screenshots at some time intervals if you enable this feature. It can also detect the apps used while working on projects as well as idle time.
• Invoicing: You can create invoices separately from the app and send these to clients via email.
• Client access: You can invite clients to view time reports, time sheets, and invoices on their projects. Of the software in our list, only Time Doctor and Trackabi offer this functionality.

Visit Trackabi

• Time tracking: Time Doctor uses a separate desktop app to track time. You can see the tracked hours separately for each task and the total number of hours for the day. Time Doctor can also record activities offline and will sync your time and screenshots when your internet connection is restored. Time Doctor will also alert you if it detects user inactivity and ask if you’re still working. If it doesn’t receive a response, the timer automatically stops tracking time.
• Project management: You can create a project and assign tasks to users. You can even limit access to projects to specific employees or groups. It’s easy to monitor the number of hours worked for specific tasks. It has an activity bar that displays the task you’re working on and the hours tracked, but you can also hide the activity bar.
• Productivity reports: Time Doctor provides daily and weekly reports that include hours, projects, tasks, as well as website and app usage per team or user. These reports can be downloaded as XSL or CSV files.
• Web, activity, and app monitoring: The app records employees’ website activities and automatically detects unproductive websites while working. Project managers can rate sites as productive, neutral, or unproductive, and can be applied on various levels such as specific users, groups, or company-wide. Time Doctor is as robust as Hubstaff and Paymo when it comes to productivity and employee monitoring tools.
• Client access: With a Premium Time Doctor subscription, you can show your work progress to clients by providing them login access. You can determine what your clients can view, including reports, screenshots, and tracked hours.
• Payroll: You can convert tracked hours into payroll time sheets. You can assign hourly rates per employee or determine payroll periods. Time Doctor also supports all currencies and common payment methods such as PayPal and Payoneer.

Visit Time Doctor

• Time tracking: Not only does its time tracker help you log hours for projects, but it can also be used to monitor clock-ins/outs and overtime. And, similar to Clockify, it has leave management capabilities to help you track vacation, sick, and holiday leaves.
• Productivity tools: TimeCamp has a wide range of online tools to help monitor work productivity. It tracks idle time and monitors the hours spent on websites, apps, and documents. With its productivity assistant feature, you can set goals and measure your productive and idle hours. You also have the option to activate its computer screenshots function in case you want full transparency and present proof of work to clients. TimeCamp has a private time mode that you can turn on if you want to take breaks.
• Project management features: TimeCamp is the only software in this list that has an automated time tracking feature that allows users to set up keywords for clients or projects. Once TimeCamp detects the keywords, it automatically assigns this time to the right client or project. The web-based and desktop apps can then run silently in the background. Users can also monitor project profitability with its broad range of reporting features.
• Invoicing and client payments: TimeCamp has smart invoices that you can easily generate and send to clients via email, a private link, or a PDF file. Clients can even pay you directly from the invoice through PayPal. However, you have to upgrade to at least its Pro plan to get these features. For a more budget-friendly option, consider Harvest since it offers its invoicing and online payment tools for free—provided you need only one user seat and two active projects.

Read our TimeCamp review

Using time tracking and billing software for your business is highly effective in streamlining work for accountants. Aside from providing transparent and accurate data on time spent for clients and projects, it also helps monitor costs, revenue, and business growth.

Here are the reasons why you should consider using time tracking software for accountants:

• Automate workflow: The software automatically records time spent on billable and non-billable work—plus, it’s easier to compute overtime hours. Instead of manually creating invoices, you can do that with the software in a few clicks. Timekeeping software can minimize data entry and reduce repetitive tasks. This way, you save time and energy, which could have been spent on more important tasks for your business.
• Measure profitability: To determine profitability, you want to track the hours and the costs spent on projects or clients. Without accurate monitoring, it’s difficult to pinpoint which clients and projects are unprofitable. With time tracking software, you can easily manage hourly rates and calculate profits.
• Manage productivity: If you want to learn about how employees use their time at work without constantly asking them what they’re up to, then you need a timekeeping software. With it, you can determine how much time goes into the tasks and where the rest of the time goes. You’re also confident that the numbers you send to your clients are correct.

It can be overwhelming to choose from different time tracking software. To help you, here is the list of features you need in an accounting time tracking software.

• Track billable and non-billable hours
• Create projects and tasks and assign them to users
• Assign budgets and estimates to projects and tasks
• Adjust billing rates for projects, clients, or users
• Create and send invoices for work done to clients
• Allows you to create custom reports to provide better business insights
• Automatically monitor productivity by providing accurate time spent on apps, web usage, and other activities