Time literally is money, and no one knows it better than people who have a business to run. Keeping track of how much time your employees actually spend at work is critical to many aspects of your business. Do it the wrong way, and you’ll face the consequences of running a loose ship. Do it well, and your employees and contractors get paid accurately and on time.
Today, we’ll go through some of the very best timesheet software that you can try out with your team in 2023 and beyond. But first…
Why use timesheets?
Timesheets are not new by any means. They were invented in an era when employees would physically come by the office, punch in as they started working, and punch out when they were done. The practice came into existence to make sure everyone was present and working and more importantly, that they showed up on time.
Over time, the way we worked changed, but timesheets did not get obsolete. In today’s age, timesheets are used to calculate payroll, accurately bill your clients, and ensure that your employees are doing the work they are assigned.
Luckily, there is no more need for physical stations where employees punch in and out. Instead, timesheet software takes care of all the heavy lifting online and in the cloud.
Here are the best tools for this job.
Timely
If you ever felt like creating timesheets is a chore, you haven’t tried Timely before. Used by over 5,000 businesses around the world, Timely lets you accurately and easily track your time and create timesheets regardless of your industry or business use case. It’s so easy that you’ll save 75% of the time (pun intended) on time-tracking admin work compared to other tools.
Privacy comes first with our app, which means that you cannot track what your employees are doing as they’re tracking their time — no screenshots, no video recordings, no mouse or keyboard tracking.
However, your employees can get access to their data in a super accurate way. Start Timely once, and it shows you the exact breakdown of the apps, tasks, and processes that you’ve been through during the day.
This makes it effortless to create timesheets and figure out billable hours, as you don’t have to manually go through different apps to try and figure out where your time went. To support you in efficient time tracking, there are plenty of integrations, including tools such as Asana, Basecamp, Github, Google Calendar, and many others.
The pricing is pretty simple - the basic plan is $9 per month, unlocking up to 50 projects for 3 teams. To get all unlimited features and projects, you can upgrade and get the Premium for $16 per user per month.
Harvest
Without a doubt, Harvest is one of the best-known time-tracking apps in the business. While some people may dislike its slim feature set, others love it for its ease of use. Either way, if you’re looking to create timesheets across projects and nothing more than that, this tool fits the bill.
Harvest lets you track your time and create reports for your team or individual employees. You can see how they spent time across different tasks and projects. There is a good amount of integrations with popular tools like Asana, Slack, Trello, Basecamp, and others.
For invoicing and payments, you can integrate Harvest with apps such as Xero, Stripe, and Quickbooks.
If you want to use it forever, you can do so for free, provided you don’t go over 2 projects. Paid plans start at $10.80 per user per month, giving you access to unlimited projects and all the features and integrations.
Toggl Track
There are plenty of reasons why Toggl Track has a large following, but we’ll single out one — its pledge to be fully anti-surveillance. With this app, your employees can accurately track their time and submit their timesheets without any fear that you are spying on them as their employer and tracking their devices.
Toggl Track allows you to start the timer and seamlessly move across different devices, with all the time logged in a central timesheet. Whether you run a business and want to keep track of your employees or you run a freelance operation and want accurate billable hours, Toggl has all your bases covered.
If integrations are your primary interest, Toggl has lots to offer. That means 100+ integrations with popular project management, sales and billing, and invoicing apps.
Their forever-free plan is pretty popular, but it only works for up to 5 users. Paid plans start at $9 per user per month, which unlocks most of the app’s best features.
Paymo
If you’re looking for timesheets and a bit of extra on top, Paymo is worth your consideration. It started out as a time-tracking app, but over time, it developed into a full-fledged project management tool with time tracking and invoicing.
This doesn’t mean that creating timesheets is complex — it’s actually pretty intuitive, and you can start and stop your timers with a few clicks. Once you’re done, you can manually edit your timesheets from the dashboard if need be.
There is a high level of customization, so you can change the time intervals for displaying timesheets, display them for one person or everyone at once, or filter them according to your specific criteria.
The free plan is somewhat limited since it gives you up to 3 projects and 50 tasks, which you’ll run out of pretty quickly. Paid plans begin at $4.95 per user per month, giving you unlimited clients, but you still only get 100 tasks monthly per user. For unlimited everything, you’ll need to pay $9.95/user/month.
Clicktime
While most of the tools here focus on time tracking, Clicktime is a tool specifically made for easy online timesheets. While it’s not as slick in terms of the user experience and interface as some other competitors on this list, it certainly gets the job done.
You get all the essential features — time tracking, time sheets, payroll, billable hours, and more. Once you decide you need a bit more, you can dig deeper with features such as time off management, project costs, workforce planning, and others. There are even basic project management features included, but you’ll be better off with a standalone tool.
Given its feature set, Clicktime comes at a good price of $10 per user per month. To get more advanced features, such as advanced billing rates and approval workflows, you’ll have to pay $13 monthly for each user.
Hourstack
For people who are visual types and have a penchant for apps like Trello with Kanban boards, Hourstack is the ideal time-tracking tool. The feature set is not exactly unique, but the way that time is displayed definitely is. Once timesheets come in, you can see logged time entries in the form of cards on a Kanban board, similar to tasks in Trello.
It’s pretty intuitive to use, and literally anyone who’s used an app online can get started with Hourstack in minutes. You can track individual times, oversee your entire team or get visual representations of how your entire company is spending time at work.
The integration list is pretty lengthy and includes a lot of heavy hitters such as Asana, Basecamp, Slack, ClickUp, Hubspot, and many others.
There is a free trial available, but there are no forever free plans like with the other tools. There are two paid plans, Personal and Team, priced at $9 and $12 per user per month, respectively. If you want to get Hourstack for your company, you’ll be forced to get the pricier plan.
QuickBooks Time (formerly known as TSheets)
Most businesses don’t start their tech stack with time tracking and timesheet software. In fact, there’s a huge chance you got your accounting and invoice software first. If Quickbooks is your tool of choice, then QuickBooks Time might be your logical choice for creating timesheets.
Previously known as TSheets, this tool is heavily integrated into the QuickBooks ecosystem and allows you to easily create timesheets across your team, track billable hours and manage audit trails from a single dashboard.
What makes this an interesting solution (besides the native QuickBooks integration) is the ability to track time physically, like a traditional timesheet. Thanks to time kiosks, mobile apps, GPS location tracking, and geofencing, you can create timesheets for team members working across different locations.
Pricing is a bit tricky as QuickBooks time isn’t offered as a standalone tool. It comes included with QuickBooks Online Payroll Premium and Elite, which start at about $37 per user per month. If you’re already using QuickBooks, it’s the logical choice. For a standalone timesheet tool, there are better choices from this list.
TMetric
Ready to embrace the dark side? Out of all the timesheet software mentioned on our list, TMetric is the only one that doesn’t put privacy first. That means that besides tracking time and creating timesheets, you can also use it for employee monitoring — if that’s your thing.
Creating timesheets and measuring how your employees spend their time is just one aspect of TMetric. If you want to, you can get the app to monitor your employees and take screenshots as they work. TMetric also tracks the apps they use and websites they visit so that no one can bill you for development when they were in fact browsing cat memes on Reddit.
The features are similar to what you would find with the competitors, except for the different versions of the tool. In other words, you can track time on mobile, through a desktop app (that does all the employee monitoring), or online.
The forever free plan has the basics and is actually more unlimited than many competitors mentioned above. To get all the features (including task management and employee monitoring), you need a paid plan and they start at $5 per user per month.
Start creating timesheets today
Timesheets have not gone extinct — they’ve just adapted to the modern age. Instead of clocking in and out using punch cards, you can now use one of these timesheet software solutions to track your employees’ time more accurately and save not just time but also money in the process.
And if you’re looking for a reliable partner in crime for creating timesheets, sign up for Timely today! You get all the great time tracking features, full employee privacy, and all of that at a great price point.
