Pick the one that matches how you report hours, download it, open it in Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice or Google Sheets. No signup, no email, no macros. They are CSV rather than XLSX on purpose: a CSV opens everywhere, survives being emailed to a client, and carries no formulas you have to trust — which also means the Amount column is yours to fill or to make a formula out of.
All four share the same core columns — date, client, project, description, hours, a billable flag, rate and amount — so a row moved between them still makes sense, and any of them can be pasted into the same invoice.
One row per stretch of work, with start and end times.
Date · Client · Project · Task / Description · Start · End · Hours · Billable (Y/N) · Rate (USD) · Amount (USD)
The default for hourly freelance work. Start and End make each row auditable when a client queries a line, Hours is what your invoice sums, and the Billable flag keeps admin on the sheet without it reaching the bill. Amount is Hours × Rate, so one formula fills the column.
Seven dated rows for one week, Monday to Sunday.
Week Starting · Date · Day · Client · Project · Task / Description · Hours · Billable (Y/N) · Rate (USD) · Amount (USD)
The dates and weekday names are already filled in, which is the point: an empty row for Thursday is a visible gap rather than a day you forgot existed. Duplicate the sheet each week and change Week Starting. Use this one if you report hours weekly or work to a weekly cap.
Fourteen dated rows for a two-week pay period.
Pay Period · Date · Day · Client · Project · Task / Description · Hours · Billable (Y/N) · Rate (USD) · Amount (USD)
Same shape as the weekly sheet across a full pay period, so the total you hand over matches the period a contractor invoice or a payroll run is cut on. The Pay Period column repeats on every row, which keeps the sheet sortable when several periods end up in one file.
Per client, per engagement, per phase.
Date · Client · Engagement · Project · Phase · Task / Description · Hours · Billable (Y/N) · Rate (USD) · Amount (USD)
For consulting work where one client runs several engagements at different rates. Engagement holds the contract or SOW reference, Phase splits discovery from delivery, and Rate varies by row rather than by person. Filter on Engagement and you have the backup for a single statement of work.
A timesheet is a record of the hours a person worked, broken down by day and usually by client, project or task. It exists to turn time into money: payroll runs on it, hourly invoices are built from it, and it is the evidence when a client asks what a line on the bill actually covers.
Every timesheet carries the same core — a date, what was worked on, and how long it took. Past that the columns follow the money: a client and project so hours can be split across bills, a billable flag so unpaid admin stays visible without reaching the invoice, and a rate and amount so the sheet totals to a figure you can send. If your hours are written as 7:45 rather than 7.75, the hours to decimal calculator converts the column before it is multiplied by a rate.
A timecard is the narrower relative. It records clock-in and clock-out times for attendance and payroll — when someone was at work. A timesheet records what the time went on, which is what billing needs. Plenty of hourly workers fill in both, and outside payroll software the two words get used interchangeably. If clock times are what you actually have, the timecard calculator turns a week of them into daily and weekly totals, breaks deducted and overtime split out.
A template is only as good as the moment you write in it. The hours that go missing are never the four-hour block you spent on the main task; they are the twenty minutes on a client email, the call that ran long, the fix you shipped between two other things. Fill the row when the work ends, not on invoice day — reconstructing a week from memory reliably undercounts it.
Two habits make the sheets pay for themselves. Keep non-billable work on the sheet with the flag set to N, so you can see what the business costs you rather than pretending it is free. And write descriptions a client could read without a translation: “homepage wireframes” settles a query, “design” starts one. What a freelance timesheet needs covers the reasoning behind each column, and the freelance timesheet template walkthrough works the hourly sheet through a full week and out to an invoice.
Worth being straight about, since we sell the alternative. A spreadsheet does not know you started working. It will not notice that you spent forty minutes in a client’s repo this morning, it will not remind you at six that Wednesday is blank, and it cannot tell you which of last month’s rows never made it onto an invoice. Every one of those is your memory doing a job software could do.
It also stops at the total. Turning the billable column into a document a client can pay means retyping it somewhere else, and the retyping is where the transcription errors live. A template is the right tool when your week is simple, your clients are few, and you would rather own the file than the subscription. Past that, the manual approach quietly costs more than it saves.
If that is the wall you have hit, the automatic time tracker records the working day without a timer to start, and freelance invoicing software explains how those hours become a PDF invoice without a second document.
BillNotch records which application and window you worked in, sorts it into your projects, and adds up the billable total for you. Fourteen days, no card. The templates stay free either way.
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