An automatic time tracker that ends at the invoice

Most trackers described as automatic still hand you a timeline to sort out later. BillNotch is built around the whole distance: a desktop app records your work while you do it, the activity is matched to client projects, you approve anything the tracker is unsure about, and the billable total becomes a PDF invoice. The only step that asks for your attention is the one where your judgement actually matters.

capture → categorize → review → invoice

How does automatic time tracking work?

Four stages, and you are only present for the third.

1. 01

   The desktop app records the active window

   Install it once on Windows, macOS, or Linux and sign the device in with an API key you issue. From then on it records which app and window is in front of you, second by second, and notices when you go idle. Nothing to start, nothing to stop.

2. 02

   The activity is matched to a project

   A keyword matcher runs on your own machine first and stamps a project on the upload when it is confident. On the server, new activity is matched by similarity against the entries you have already confirmed — so the tracker gets more accurate at your work specifically, not at work in general.

3. 03

   Anything uncertain waits for you on Review

   A suggested project is stored as a draft, never written silently onto the entry. Review shows the day’s drafts — plus any calendar meetings you connected — and you confirm, correct, or reject each one. Every correction becomes a rule that handles the next occurrence on its own.

4. 04

   The billable total becomes an invoice

   Billable status is inherited from the project, so the total is already correct. Generate a PDF invoice for a client and period, or export the CSV. The Revenue Leak Finder then scans for billable time that was tracked and never invoiced.

What the tracker records, and what it never touches

Is an automatic time tracker private?

It depends entirely on where the data goes, so here is where ours goes. Activity syncs to your own BillNotch account over an API key you issue and can revoke; on the desktop that key lives in your operating system’s keychain, never in a config file. You choose the sync mode per device, and window titles can stay on the machine that recorded them.

The matching that makes categorization work is deliberately local to the server: activity is compared against your organization’s own confirmed history using an embedder that runs in-process, so window titles are never sent to a model provider to be embedded. A language model is only involved for genuinely novel activity, and it never runs while your time is being ingested. Data is processed on EU servers and is never sold. This is a tracker built for the person doing the work, not for someone watching them.

How it differs from a timer-based tracker

A stopwatch measures the time you remembered to measure. That is a different quantity from the time you worked, and the gap is where hourly revenue quietly goes.

The manual timer is still there on the dashboard when you want one — some work is easier to bracket by hand. It is simply no longer the thing your income depends on.

Why another time tracker?

It is a fair question, and the category is genuinely crowded. But the tools in it tend to solve one half of the job. The timer apps built around invoicing still need you to press start, which is the exact moment the hour goes missing. The trackers that do fix the timer problem usually pay for it with surveillance — screen recording, screenshots on an interval, keystroke counts — and most of them stop at a report, leaving the bill to a second tool and a spreadsheet in between.

BillNotch is the answer to both at once: capture that needs nothing from you, with no screenshots and no keystroke logging, and an invoice at the end of it. That combination is the whole claim — not that nobody else tracks time, but that the version which records your hours without watching you, and then bills them, is the one that was missing.

Where it runs

The desktop tracker is a native app for Windows, macOS, and Linux — the third one matters, because most of this category skips it. Every release is built and tested on all three. Two optional companions feed the same log: a Chrome extension that reports the domain of your active tab to sharpen categorization, and a Google or Microsoft calendar connection that turns your meetings into suggested entries on the same review screen.

What it will not do for you

The review step is not a rough edge waiting to be smoothed away — it is the design. A suggested project sits in a draft column until you accept it, because an invoice is a claim you are making to a client and software should not make it on your behalf. If you want a tracker that decides silently and hopes you never audit it, this is the wrong one.

The rest of the honest list: the tracker only sees the machine it is installed on, so work done on paper or in a meeting room needs a manual entry or a connected calendar. There is no mobile app. There is no free tier — a 14-day trial, then $9 a month. And on day one the categorization knows nothing about your clients; it earns its accuracy from the corrections you make in the first week.