The Best Time Tracking Apps for Small Businesses: Find Out Where Your Time Is Going and How You Can Get More of It Back with These Tools

What’s the single most important asset you have as a small business owner? It’s your time.You might have the same 24 hours a day that anyone else has, but how you spend those hours is immensely important. It’s all too easy to look up and realize that most of the day is gone, and you have little to show for it. Where did those hours go? What did you accomplish? How many of them were billable, and how many were just “lost” time?

These are critical questions to answer, but small business owners often don’t have the details necessary to do so. The good news is that time-tracking apps can help. With the right app, you can:

• Track billable and non-billable hours

• Create accurate invoices

• Analyze task time consumption

• Improve time waste

• Streamline productivity

• Make informed decisions about business processes

The challenge, of course, is that there’s a wide range of time-tracking apps out there. Short of spending yet more time comparing each option, how is a small business owner supposed to choose the right app?

We’ve ranked the best time-tracking apps for small businesses to help. Each app we’ve listed brings something to the table, whether that’s real-time tracking, data exporting, detailed report generation, time block additions, or something else. However, each one is designed with small business owners in mind (rather than enterprise-level organizations). That means they’re easy to use, affordable (or even free), and often designed to scale with your business, so you don’t need to worry about paying for features and capabilities that you don’t yet need (until you do).

Why tracking time matters for small businesses

You might be wondering why it’s so critical to accurately track time spent within your small business. If it’s just you and a couple of employees, surely it’s easy enough to estimate time, right? Not so much. Let’s look at some rather startling small business time-tracking statistics to illustrate why it’s so important that you have the right app in place.

• Manual time entry and data adjustments are immensely time-consuming and prone to error (Deloitte).

• Automated time tracking can help recapture almost $670,000 per year (Acumen Data Systems).

• 75% of businesses in the US are affected by time theft, which can cost you up to 7%of your gross annual payroll (Connecteam/Workpuls).

• The average employee is only productive for about 2 ½ hours a day (Vouchercloud).

• Employees spend up to four hours a week on unproductive tasks (Workpuls).

• Employees spend two to five hours a day on calls or attending meetings with nothing productive to show for it (Kornferry).

• Everyday, US businesses lose a collected 50 million hours due to unrecorded, nonproductive tasks (Market Research).

As you can see, time tracking is a crucial consideration for businesses of any size and within any industry. Tracking, recording, and analyzing tasks can help ensure productivity across your team (or just within your own schedule). It’s time to take back your time!

When you want a dynamic solution that takes your time management further, consider enlisting the assistance of our virtual receptionists here at Smith.ai. We can handle mission-critical services like appointment scheduling and lead intake, inbound and outbound call overflow, and more. 

Clockify: best overall

If you’re looking for an affordable (free) way to track your time, then Clockify should be at the top of your list. It’s one of the most-used options out there and consistently gets good reviews from its users. There’s an app for Chrome and Firefox, as well as options for Mac, Windows, and Linux machines. You’ll also have access to native mobile apps (iOS and Android).

Clockify was built from the ground up to help small business owners track time, but it also does a lot more. You can use it to track payroll hours, check time spent across projects, and more. You can break time down by project, device, client, and other designations, too, so you always have an accurate idea of where your time’s being spent and whether you need to adjust things or not.

Best of all? Clockify is free to use if you need minimal features. As your business grows, you can move up to the paid version, which is just $3.99 per user per month. There’s a tier to fit any budget or need, too, ranging from $5.49 per user per month for the Standard plan to $7.99 per user per month for the Pro plan and $11.99 per month for the Enterprise, but that might be more than most small business owners ever need.

Toggl Track: best for free use

Toggl Track is available for those who need a reliable time-tracking app but might not be able to find room in the budget for a paid tool. It has a generous offering in its free service tier that allows access from all devices: Android, Windows, macOS, iOS, Linux, web access, and browser extensions are available. This effortless tool doesn’t ask much, which is what makes it so easy for people to use. Unlike some apps that require you to input all of the details of the task before tracking, Toggl allows you to track time now and fill in the rest when you can. 

It also has some of the most detailed options available for time tracking, including the option on the Chrome extension to automatically start or stop time when the browser is open or closed. Plus, it has great idle detection and allows for manual corrections as needed. There’s even a handy setting that follows the Pomodoro Technique, allowing you to work on a project for a set amount of time, take a short break, and then go back to work. 

You can also integrate this app with dozens of different tools like Zapier, Slack, Google Calendar, and others. It’s free for up to five users, and if you need to upgrade to the Starter plan, you’ll pay just $9 per user per month. 

Harvest: best for teams 

Harvest is a platform that’s also available for iOS, macOS, Android, Windows, the web, and via browser extensions. It’s a tool that’s geared toward teams and offers features liketime tracking, expense reporting, project and team tracking, detailed reports, invoicing, and other tools. Timesheets allow users to add time that hasn’t been automatically tracked or edit any of the tasks that might not have been captured correctly. 

If you aren’t great at time tracking, this tool is the answer. Plus, all of your users can install it on as many devices as they’d like — if they want the desktop app, the Android app, and the browser extensions, they can do that. The apps even work offline, so team members can record their tasks even when they are offline. The administrator also gets automatic notifications of all tasks, timesheets, and change requests and can approve or edit time, as well. 

Plus, Harvest integrates with all of the apps you’re already using, including some direct tracking integrations with tools like Trello, Asana, and Slack so that you don’t even have to transfer the time yourself. It integrates with Zapier, too, so you can make your integrations as needed, and it’s free if you’re a solo user with only one or two active projects at a time. Otherwise, you’ll spend $10.80 per user per month, which is also pretty affordable. 

Hubstaff: best for staff management

Hubstaff is great for the growing small business looking to hire help, monitor productivity, GPS tracking, and provide automated payroll. With the Hubstaff app, each member of the team can stay in touch with each other, build projects, and easily track the time spent on each project while sending messages and status updates with minimal effort. With options for desk work or fieldwork, Hubstaff has diversity in use and is available on the standard offerings of MacOS, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS, and Chrome.

With features in time tracking, outlining timesheets, automated payroll, productivity management, and more, Hubstaff offers a way to keep in constant communication on projects, tasks, and even daily time management. With a wide array of products, Hubstaff Time, Desk, Field, Task, and Talent, there is something viable for every work-related project to keep things organized and running smoothly while finding and reducing the gaps in productivity. The company strives for efficiency, and its platform shows it.

With over 30 great integrations, from Zapier to Salesforce, Slack, and others, Hubstaff is very focused on making time tracking transparent, efficient, and easy to use. Your small business will be able to manage productivity much more easily and with more communication as well. They offer a 14-day trial period to see if the product is right for you; from there, the pricing starts free for a single user. The Grow plan is $7.50 per user per month, the Team plan is $10 per user per month, and the Enterprise plan is $25 per user per month.

RescueTime: best for reducing distractions

If you’ve got an easily distracted team, or even if you’re the one with the bad habit of getting lost in your phone or a good conversation for a half-hour, RescueTime is the app that will save the day. It’s available for Firefox, Linux, and Brave, in addition to the standard offerings for macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and Chrome. This is an automatic tracking app that includes a monitor that will help track your usage. This allows your usage to be sent automatically to the RescueTime servers and presented in your dashboard in real-time. 

The app already knows what tools you’re using and how long you’re using them this way, which saves a lot of manual entry. It also tracks your habits to try to categorize your effectiveness — Facebook is a “very distracting” task, and something like Trello is “very productive.” There’s a website blocker included called FocusTime, which can guarantee that you can’t access the doom scrollingwhen you need to get things done. 

You can also add exceptions or just time your usage outside of work so that you’re not overdoing it on the “breaks” — it’s not a break if you spend an hour on social media. One cool feature is that you can use #focustime to schedule sessions automatically in Outlook, Office 365, or Google Calendar. Slack has an integration, and you can use it with Zapier, too, to create your own connections. The basic plan is free, while the Premium package will cost you $12 a month, which includes the time-blocking features, project and document tracking, and more. 

Apploye: best for remote teams 

Managing remote teams and tracking remote members' working hours is undeniably easy with Apploye, a real-time tracking software with a user-friendly and intuitive dashboard. With just a simple click on"Start Tracking," this software will start monitoring users' activities on websites they are visiting and apps they use while working. 

Apploye can track mobile team members' GPS locations from where they are working, project tracking, timesheet management on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly basis, invoicing, Pomodoro timer, and many more. Remote employees have the flexibility to create their tasks, select their organization, and do manual timesheet entries for any eventualities. Apploye has time tracking with a screenshot monitoring featureby which employers may wish to get 1 to 3 screenshots within 10 minutes. Apploye can even create employee rankings for your organization by analyzing productivity levels.

Apploye has two pricing tiers. The Standard tier costs $2.50 per user per month, while the Elite tier costs $3.50 per user per month (this is the option designed for remote and hybrid workers).

Everhour: best for availability management

Everhour offers a lightweight scheduling and time-tracking solution that is available via web or browser extension, as well as a beta version for iOS. It can be used in other apps with integrations, too, thanks to tools like Zapier. You can connect it directly to apps like Asana to track projects and automatically transfer the information to this app, and there’s even a sync feature that allows you to add a timer inside the app so that you can start and stop time right in the app. 

This tool is great for small collaborative teams that need to track availability and hours that people have to dedicate to certain projects. There’s an option to create time-off logs so that you know when everyone will be available, and you can even see timed sessions or events that went over their allotment because they’re highlighted in red. 

Everhour’s timer is web-based, so it won’t work offline. That can make time tracking difficult in some instances, but for those who always have access to the web, it’s not a problem. The tool integrates with FreshBooks, Xero, Google Sheets, Trello, and several other apps to ensure that you can track time as efficiently as possible. You can use the app for free if you’re not worried about the integrations, or plans start at $5 per user per month. 

HourStack: best for visualization

If you’re looking for a different way to manage and visualize your time, HourStack has a solution. This app uses windows or blocks like a calendar rather than a list of time slots or tasks. It also puts more emphasis on time planning than many of the apps out there. You can even allocate time for later tasks, including how much time you think it will take. The app will then help you keep an eye on your expectations by monitoring your time once you get started. 

You can create projects and tasks and then color-code them for visual distinction and organization. You’ll also be able to add labels and color-code those, and there’s a time limit feature that you can set to make sure that you’re not overdoing it. If you’re constantly finding yourself spending 10 or 11 hours at the office, this can be a great way to cut back and give yourself more time outside of work. 

HourStack is available on the web, as well as for iOS and Android. It integrates with tons of productivity tools, but you can’t integrate the timer. However, you can sync tasks and calendar events to HourStack, import and export data, and more. You can integrate with Asana, Google Calendar, HubSpot, Trello, and dozens of others, as well as Zapier, which allows you to create custom integrations. This tool starts at $12 per month for a single user on the Personal plan or $15 per month per user for the Team plan. 

Don’t just track time; get more time back by partnering with Smith.ai

By this point, you should have a good idea of what the best time-tracking apps forsmall businesses can offer. From free options to immensely scalable tools, it’s never been easier to find an option that fits your business, budget, and team and that will allow you to take back control over your time.

However, you can take things a step further and get even more time out of your day when you work with the virtual receptionists at Smith.ai. We can handle overflow call answering, appointment scheduling, lead intake, live website chat, and even SMS message answering so that you have time for the tasks that require your attention. Imagine no more dealing with wrong numbers or spam calls, plus the confidence that comes from knowing that you have professional receptionists answering every call that comes in. We can even integrate with your tech stack to sync information seamlessly and keep everything streamlined.

Schedule a live chat consultation today to discuss how our solutions can help you grow your business by getting more time in your days. You can also find us at hello@smith.ai or call (650) 709-2947.