The time tracking app for consultants who bill for their time.

The hours consultants never time

Consulting work resists timing. The engagement is not a block of production hours; it is a call that ran twenty minutes long, the reading you did to prepare for it, the note you wrote afterwards, the follow-up question answered three days later. None of them feels big enough to open a timer for, and together they are a meaningful slice of the month. At $150 or $250 an hour the arithmetic is unforgiving: four untracked hours is most of a day’s revenue, gone because nobody wrote it down.

Passive capture changes what you have to remember: the record is already there when you sit down to bill, so the question shifts from “what did I do on Tuesday?” to “is this right?”. The revenue leak calculator works out what the gap is worth at your rate.

Meetings, travel, and the work off the screen

An honest limit first: BillNotch records what happens on your machine. A call taken on your phone in a taxi, a whiteboard session on a client’s site, a flight spent reading a brief on paper — none of that is on screen, and the tracker will not pretend otherwise. Add those as manual entries, or start the manual timer for the session; the point of automatic capture is that it covers everything else, so the handful of entries you make by hand are the only ones you have to think about.

The screen work around a meeting is where the recovery is. Prep, the deck you revised the night before, the shared doc open during the call, the write-up afterwards — all of it is captured against the engagement without a decision from you. And the tracker watches for idle, so a long lunch does not quietly become a billable hour.

A record you can put in front of a client

Disputes are usually not about the rate; they are about what a line said. Every entry carries a timestamp, a duration, the project and client it belongs to, and whether it is billable, so an invoice line traces back to dated activity instead of a reconstruction you wrote on Friday. Keyword rules — a client domain, a shared drive, a ticket prefix — file activity into the right engagement as it happens, and anything ambiguous waits on the review screen rather than being assigned silently.

When it is time to bill, generate a PDF invoice from a client’s billable total with your logo and payment terms, or export the same rows as CSV for a bookkeeper. You see the invoice before your client does — nothing is sent automatically. Read how to invoice a client for turning that total into a document that gets paid.

Confidential work stays confidential

Consulting means other people’s sensitive material on your screen, so the capture is deliberately narrow: no screenshots, no keystroke logging, no page contents — the application in front and how long you stayed there. You choose per device whether window titles sync at all, and each device connects with an API key you issue and revoke. AI categorization is off unless you turn it on, so the default is a deterministic keyword matcher and nothing about your work reaches a third-party model. Data is processed on EU servers and never sold; the privacy policy is specific about all of it.