How To Bill Time Like A Pro

Some years ago I started freelancing as a programmer, since I wanted to have more freedom with my time and earn more money. Since I’ve been living in an eastern european country, it only made sense to work remotely as a freelancer and earn at an international rate.

At first I started as a freelancer on upwork and had some decent gigs there. While doing that, upwork was providing their own time tracking app that was easy to use. You would just start the timer while working, stop it when you finish and upwork would take care of billing your client for you.

However, at one point, I was lucky enough to find myself some clients outside of upwork. But the question that appear was: How do I keep track of my times in order to provide fair reports to my clients?

Probably this is a question that many freelancers and companies ask themselves as well. Luckily there are plenty of solutions out there such as Clockify, Toogl and Harvest.

I, however, wanted to make a personal project out of this. I thought that since I’m planing to use this time tracker for long, it’s better to create it myself. This will also be a good exercise to put in practice my programming knowledge and also I could add any new feature that I may need in the future.

BillTime.io

That’s how, one year ago I managed to launch my time tracking app. Initially it was called Timo-Track but recently I rebranded it as billtime.io.

The features that billtime.io offers so far are the following:

1. Time Tracking (Counter & manually adding it)+ Exporting it to Excel + Marking Billed Times and associating them to projects/clients/invoices + Statistics

2. Invoice generation in multiple languages + association with times + mailing the invoice directly to your client

3. Clients and projects managment

4. Users managment — create subusers of your organization and restrict permissions for them according to your needs

5. REST API to automate your time addings and invoice generation

6. Scheduling invoices on projects and receiving them on your email along with the associated times excel

I know this isn’t much but I believe it’s a very good start. The website already gained attention and people have been using it for some time now, without any problem. I already have over 2000 hours billed in my own tool and I’m proud of how things are turning out.

While there are many other popular alternatives, I believe that billtime.io diferentiates itself from the competition through its easy to use interface and through all the cool automation features that it has without additional costs.

And since I’m a freelancer myself, I can tell what kind of features this tool needs and I’m more open to listen to new ideas.