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Best Timesheet App for Contractors

By Frame Sixty Labs · Last updated: August 17, 2026

What does a contractor actually need from a timesheet?

An employee's timesheet feeds payroll, and payroll has opinions: a fixed pay period, an overtime threshold, a rounding policy set by someone else. A contractor's timesheet feeds an invoice, which changes the job entirely.

Four things have to come out of it:

• An accurate total per client. Not per week — per client, because that is the unit you bill.
• A decimal conversion. Rates are quoted per hour, so 10:20 has to become 10.3333 before it can be multiplied.
• A rounding rule you can defend. Exact minutes, six-minute tenths, or quarter hours — whichever the contract says.
• A record the client can check. A total with no line items behind it is the thing that delays payment.

Notice what is missing: approvals, overtime multipliers, and anything that files taxes. Those are payroll problems. Buying a payroll-shaped tool to solve an invoicing problem is the most common way contractors end up paying a monthly fee for a stopwatch.

Which timesheet tools fit contractors?

Two columns you will find on other comparison pages are absent on purpose: star ratings and download counts. We cannot verify anyone else's, so printing them would be decoration rather than information.

How does a real contractor week total up?

Here is a two-client week — the shape most independent contractors actually have, rather than one continuous 40-hour block:

Northgate Studio at $85.00/hr: Mon 3:20 · Wed 4:45 · Fri 2:15
Ravel Foods at $65.00/hr: Tue 6:10 · Thu 5:50

Total Northgate in H:MM. Minutes first: 20 + 45 + 15 = 80 minutes, which is 1 hour 20 minutes. Hours: 3 + 4 + 2 = 9. Carry the extra hour across and Northgate is 10:20.

Ravel is quicker: 10 + 50 = 60 minutes, a full hour, and 6 + 5 = 11 hours, so Ravel is 12:00 exactly.

Now convert each total once, at the end:

Check the arithmetic the other way, which is worth doing on anything you are about to send someone. Northgate in decimal: 3.3333 + 4.75 + 2.25 = 10.3333 hours, and 10.3333 × $85.00 = $878.33. Ravel: 6.1667 + 5.8333 = 12.0000 hours, and 12 × $65.00 = $780.00. Both routes agree, so the invoice is safe to send.

The one rule underneath all of this: add in H:MM, convert once at the end. Converting every session to decimal and rounding as you go is how a week drifts by ten or fifteen minutes — the mechanics are in converting minutes to decimal hours.

What does rounding do to the invoice?

Rounding is where contractor timesheets quietly turn into arguments. Take that single 3:20 Northgate session at $85.00 an hour:

That is $14.17 of spread on one session — and if a contract implies exact minutes while your invoice quietly uses quarter hours rounded up, that gap is the thing a client's bookkeeper finds. Pick an increment, write it into the agreement, and apply it the same way every time. Billing to the exact minute is always defensible; rounding up in your own favour by default is not.

When is a tracker the right answer?

When the work is trackable. If you sit down at a desk, open one project, and work on it for a stretch, a start/stop timer is genuinely better than a calculator: it captures the time you would otherwise estimate, and it tags it to a client automatically.

Clockify and Toggl Track both do this well, with projects, clients, tags and reports, and both have free tiers. Harvest adds billable rates per project and turns tracked time straight into an invoice. FreshBooks goes further still, wrapping time tracking inside a full invoicing and accounting suite.

The catch is the same for all four: they only know what you remembered to press. A timer left running through lunch, or never started at all on a site visit, produces a record that is confidently wrong — and a confidently wrong record is worse on an invoice than a note on your phone. They also all require an account, which means your client list lives in someone else's database.

When is a calculator the right answer?

When the day does not hold still. Field work, trade work, consulting between meetings, anything where the phone is in a pocket — that day ends as a list of times on a schedule, a text message, or the back of an envelope. There is nothing to start a timer on retroactively; there is arithmetic to do.

That is where Hours fits. You type 3:20 + 4:45 + 2:15 and get 10:20, because it carries 60 minutes into an hour instead of treating 3.20 as a decimal. One tap flips the total to 10.33. Enter $85.00 as the rate and it shows the billable amount. The session stays in the saved history, and the week exports to CSV for a bookkeeper or PDF for a client. It is free, has no ads, no tracking and no sign-in, and it works with no signal at all. It has been on the iPhone App Store since 2015 and is now on Android too.

Where Hours is the wrong tool: there is no start/stop timer, no per-client project structure, no invoice generation, no expense tracking, and no team features. If you need Northgate and Ravel kept apart automatically, you either total them separately and label the exports, or you use a tracker. Be honest with yourself about which of those you will actually do every Friday.

How do I set up a contractor timesheet that survives an audit?

Whatever tool you pick, the workflow is the same five steps:

1. Capture the session the day it happens. Start and stop times, or a duration, plus which client it was for. Same day — reconstructing Tuesday on Friday is guessing, and it usually guesses low.
2. Write one line of description per session. "Revised checkout flow, 2 rounds" turns a number into something a client can approve without a phone call.
3. Total each client separately in H:MM. Keep clients apart from the start; a combined 22:20 helps nobody when you have two rates.
4. Convert the total to decimal once, then apply the rate. 10:20 → 10.3333 → × $85.00 = $878.33. Round the money at the end, not the hours along the way.
5. Export the detail and attach it. A CSV for whoever keys it in, a PDF for whoever reads it — see exporting a timesheet to CSV or PDF for which format goes where, and the spreadsheet quirk that mangles time columns.

Keep the exports. Contractors get asked about an invoice from four months ago far more often than employees get asked about a time card, and "I remember it was about ten hours" is not an answer that gets paid.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best timesheet app for contractors?

It depends where your hours come from. Time recorded as you work: Clockify or Toggl Track. Invoice generated from the same record: Harvest or FreshBooks. Hours already written down and you need the total, the decimal, and the amount: a calculator such as Hours — free, offline, no account.

Do contractors need a time tracker or a time calculator?

A tracker records time as it happens; a calculator totals time that already happened. If you can reliably press start, track. If your day ends as a list of times on paper, calculate.

How do I turn tracked hours into an invoice total?

Add in H:MM, convert the single total to decimal, then multiply by the rate. 3:20 + 4:45 + 2:15 = 10:20 = 10.3333 hours, and at $85.00 an hour that is $878.33.

Should contractors bill in 15-minute increments?

Only if the contract says so, and it should say which way you round. A 3:20 session is $283.33 to the minute and $297.50 rounded up to a quarter hour at $85.00/hr — $14.17 of difference from one session.

Is there a free timesheet app for contractors with no account?

Yes — Hours is free, runs entirely on the device, and has no ads, no tracking and no sign-in. Cloud trackers usually have free tiers, but all of them require an account.

What should a contractor's timesheet include?

Date, start and stop times or a duration, the client or project, a one-line description, and the total in both H:MM and decimal. Add the rate and amount if it ships with the invoice.