Your work hours.
One tap is enough.

Why freelancers should track their own time

Most time tracking apps want projects, clients, tags and a login first. By the time everything is set up, you have long forgotten what you were actually working on. As a freelancer you do not need project management, you need an honest hour count for your invoice. That is exactly what SoloZeit is for: tap start, work, tap stop.

You record your work time with one tap and add task and project as open text. The timer keeps running even when the screen is locked. Forgotten times you enter manually, and you can edit every session later. The day list adds up daily and weekly totals automatically, and at month-end you export a CSV or PDF hours report for your invoicing software.

All your times stay on your device. No account, no server, no cloud, no sharing. SoloZeit records and totals your hours so you keep them in your own hands. The app is a tool for time tracking and does not replace tax or legal advice.

Time tracking for freelancers: what belongs in every entry

Recorded time only turns into real money when you can tie it back to an invoice later. A vague “worked about four hours today” helps you neither with billing nor when a client comes back with a question. For your entries to actually hold up, each one should carry at least this much:

• Date plus start and end time, or simply the duration
• Client and project the time is billed to
• Task — short, but concrete enough to stand on the invoice
• Billable or not, so internal time never lands in the client’s budget
• Hourly rate or flat fee, whenever it varies from one project to the next
• Note for anything unusual, an agreement made, or extra work that came up

On loose paper or in a spreadsheet kept on the side, this slips through the cracks fast — and by the end of the month the details are gone. SoloZeit starts the tracking with a single tap and files every session straight against a client and a project, so what you end up with is a clean, billable overview instead of a guess pulled from memory.

Why clean time tracking pays off for freelancers

If you don’t capture your time straight away, you almost always underestimate it. Quick phone calls, rounds of revisions and a steady trickle of emails add up — and without a record they never make it onto the invoice. Complete, honest time tracking makes sure you actually bill every hour you put in, instead of quietly giving them away.

Proof matters just as much. When a client asks what all those hours went into, a project-based record gives you a clear, traceable answer rather than an awkward debate. Across several jobs, the same record also shows you how much a given type of work really costs you — the foundation for pricing your hourly rate and putting together quotes that hold up.

And finally there’s order on the business side. In Germany, business records and invoices are subject to retention duties (§ 147 AO). Clean time tracking makes invoicing later on easier and smooths the work with your accountant. SoloZeit is a documentation tool in all of this and does not replace tax or legal advice — judging any individual case belongs in qualified hands.

How to track your time properly

Good time tracking is a habit, not an end-of-month marathon. Here is how to go about it:

• Start right away: begin the tracking with one tap the moment the work starts — do it afterwards and you’re only guessing.
• Separate by client and project: that keeps every hour clearly attributable.
• Mark what’s billable: keep paid work apart from internal time like acquisition or bookkeeping.
• Review regularly: a weekly look stops small mistakes from carrying all the way through to the invoice.
• Check before invoicing: a quick reconciliation makes sure no hour is missing and none is counted twice.

That way you don’t go into billing on a vague feeling, but with a record you can stand behind — the best foundation for making sure your work gets paid in full.

More tools for the self-employed

Time tracking is just one piece of the office day. If you also want to keep a classic timesheet, log business trips for tax or keep track of lent equipment, you’ll find equally privacy-friendly tools for that too — offline and without an account.