9 Best Time Tracking Software for Agencies to Bill Clients

9 Best Time Tracking Software for Agencies to Bill Clients

The best time tracking software for agencies is the one that moves real hours onto a paid invoice with the fewest human steps in between. For most small Google Workspace agencies that's Stintt, because it drafts timesheets from calendars your team already keeps. Want budget alarms and a proven invoicing flow? Pick Harvest. And if your team simply refuses to track, start with whatever they'll actually press a button in — usually Toggl.

Full disclosure up front: Stintt is our product, and it sits at #1 here. We've tried to earn that spot the honest way, with verified July 2026 pricing for every tool, one real limitation per entry, and clear pointers to the tools that fit you better than we do.

Rank tools by the billing chain, not the feature list

Every billable hour travels the same path: someone captures it, attributes it to a client, signs off on it, and turns it into an invoice. Most tools automate one link of that chain and leave the rest to you.

The gaps are expensive in a countable way. Run an eight-person agency billing $120/hour, and say each person forgets one 30-minute client call a week. That's 4 unbilled hours a week, $480, which over 48 weeks is roughly $23,000 a year. Not from bad work — from bad capture. And that's before the admin time of filling timesheets at all, which we broke down in what 26 hours a year of timesheeting actually costs you.

So for each tool below, ask one question: how much of the capture-to-invoice chain does it actually run for me?

The nine tools at a glance

Tool	Tracking model	Billing path	Starting price (Jul 2026)	Best for
Stintt	Calendar drafts + approval	Invoice from approved hours	Free plan; trials, no card	Google Workspace agencies, 5–25 people
Harvest	Manual timers	Built-in invoicing, QuickBooks/Xero sync	Free (1 seat); Teams ~$9–11/seat/mo	Teams managing by project budget
Toggl Track	Manual timers	Basic invoicing all plans; approvals on Premium	Free; $9/user/mo	Teams needing dead-simple adoption
FreshBooks	Timer inside accounting suite	Native invoices + payment reminders	$23/mo list (Lite, 5 clients)	Tiny shops wanting books + billing in one
TimeCamp	Background activity tracking	Invoicing from Starter tier	Free; $3.99/user/mo annual	Cost-sensitive teams okay with monitoring
Teamwork.com	Timers on PM tasks	Invoices from logged time (Accelerate)	Free (5 users); $9.99/user/mo; $24.99 for invoicing	Agencies already in Teamwork
Scoro	Time inside an agency OS	Quote to project to invoice, one system	$19.90/user/mo, 5-seat min	20+ person firms consolidating tools
FunctionFox	Stopwatch timesheets	Estimate and retainer tracking	$10.50/user/mo annual, 3-user min	Creative studios billing against estimates
Zoho Invoice	Timer inside invoicing tool	Free invoices, quotes, reminders	Free	Freelancers and 2–3 person shops

Prices change. Every entry links the vendor's own pricing page, so check the current numbers before you commit.

1. Stintt: invoices built from approved calendar hours

Stintt runs more of the billing chain than anything else here, which is why we built it. Connect Google Calendar with read-only access (the calendar.readonly scope, so it can't edit or delete anything), and Stintt drafts timesheet entries from your events — reaching back up to 18 months if you want history. AI categorizes each entry as meetings, focus work, admin, breaks, or time off, and project rules or #tags in event titles attribute work to the right client. Work that never touches a calendar still gets in: drop a standup note in chat and it lands as a drafted entry.

The step most trackers skip is the one clients care about: approval. Nothing is billed as-is. Each person reviews their drafts, managers approve or discard (with auto-approve once the drafts earn trust), and the invoice generates directly from approved hours — PDF export, GST-compliant template included. Billing lives in your accounting stack instead? Export approved hours as Excel (one tab per person), CSV, or PDF.

No screenshots, no keystroke logging, no GPS anywhere — which matters the day you ask a senior designer to adopt a tracker. Details on our security page.

Pricing: free plan, no card (one calendar, 7 days of events per export, 50 AI-categorized events/month), plus Pro and Workspace tiers with 7- and 14-day trials on the pricing page. Workspace adds team utilization, capacity, and meeting-cost insights.

The honest limitation: it reads your calendar and connected work tools (Google Calendar, Microsoft Teams, Jira, ClickUp), not Outlook, and there's no punch clock or GPS. If your billable work happens on job sites rather than in calendars and chat, a field-service clock-in tool will serve you better than we can.

2. Harvest: budget alarms and a proven invoicing flow

Harvest has been the default agency answer for over a decade, and its core loop still holds: track time against a budget, watch actuals against estimates in real time, then generate the invoice from logged hours. Accounting integrations push those invoices into QuickBooks or Xero without re-entry. The entry point is friendly — a genuinely free plan (1 seat, 2 projects, invoicing included) and a Teams plan around $9–11/seat/month.

The honest limitation: capture is manual — timers only record what people remember to start — and timesheet approval, the thing that protects invoices from disputes, is gated to Enterprise.

Pick Harvest if project budgets are your management language and your team already has the timer habit.

3. Toggl Track: the timer people will actually press

Toggl Track wins on adoption. One button, a clean timeline, apps that behave identically on desktop and mobile. If your last rollout died because the tool annoyed people, Toggl is the least annoying timer going, and the free plan covers small teams. Every plan can generate a basic PDF invoice; Starter ($9/user/month) adds billable rates and revenue reporting, and Premium ($18/user/month, or $14 for the first year) adds profitability analysis plus the one genuinely gated feature — timesheet approvals.

The honest limitation: it's still a timer, so accuracy depends on human discipline, and discipline fades by Thursday. We wrote about that in why timer-based trackers make you the employee of your software. Budget real time for chasing missing entries at month end.

Pick Toggl if simplicity decides adoption and you're fine handling approvals and invoicing elsewhere once billing gets non-trivial.

4. FreshBooks: billing-first for very small teams

FreshBooks comes at it from the opposite direction — accounting software with time tracking included, not a tracker with invoicing bolted on. Hours link to billable projects, invoices go out branded, and automated reminders chase late payers. Time tracking is on every plan. List pricing starts at $23/month for Lite (5 billable clients); Plus at $43/month raises that to 50. There's almost always a steep first-months promo, so the sticker rarely applies day one.

The honest limitation: the client caps are the tell. FreshBooks fits a freelancer or two-to-five-person shop with a few retainers, and its tracking is basic timer-and-manual entry. Agencies with many small clients outgrow Lite fast.

5. TimeCamp: cheap automation with a monitoring trade-off

TimeCamp automates capture differently: a desktop agent records which apps and sites each person uses and builds entries from that activity — no timers to forget. It's also the cheapest paid automation here: free plan, invoicing from Starter ($3.99/user/month annual), and app-and-website tracking plus QuickBooks/Xero export on Premium ($6.99).

The honest limitation: background activity tracking is monitoring, however politely configured, and experienced staff push back hard. Before buying accuracy by watching screens, it's worth asking whether reading calendars gets you most of the accuracy with none of the trust cost. We're biased on that fork — but the fork is real.

Pick TimeCamp if budget rules everything and your team has genuinely consented to activity tracking.

6. Teamwork.com: billing inside your project management

If delivery already lives in Teamwork.com, logging time on the task keeps hours attached to their context — which makes invoices easier to defend when a client questions a line item. Time logging is included from the free plan (5 users, 5 projects) up. Watch the gates, though: Basics ($9.99/user/month yearly) gets you time tracking on tasks, but building client invoices from that time needs Accelerate ($24.99/user/month yearly). For a 10-person team that's roughly $100/month versus $250 — so the math only works if you're using the whole PM suite.

The honest limitation: you're buying a project management platform to get billing. As a pure time-and-billing purchase, this is the priciest route here.

7. Scoro: the all-in-one for larger agencies

Scoro is the consolidation play: quotes, project plans, time, invoices, and financial reporting in one system, so the estimate you quoted is the same object you bill against. For a 20-plus firm juggling five disconnected tools, that single thread from quote to invoice is the pitch. It's priced like the operations platform it is — Core from $19.90/user/month (5-seat minimum), with the features agencies actually buy it for (project budgets, revenue forecasting) on Growth and Performance, roughly $33–50/user/month.

The honest limitation: implementation is a project, not an afternoon. Below about 15 people you'd be paying consolidation prices to solve a sprawl problem you don't have yet.

8. FunctionFox: a creative-studio specialist

FunctionFox has spent two decades doing one job for design shops and in-house creative teams: timesheets with a stopwatch timer, tracked against estimates and retainers, with reporting that shows where the hours pile up. Classic runs $10.50/user/month annual (3-user minimum).

The honest limitation: it's a niche tool that feels dated next to the rest of this list, and capture is still manual. Its real value is keeping actuals honest against estimates; the invoicing mostly happens elsewhere.

Pick FunctionFox if you run a creative studio on estimates and retainers and value purpose-built reporting over polish.

9. Zoho Invoice: free billing for the smallest shops

Zoho Invoice is genuinely free: invoices, quote-to-invoice conversion, automated reminders, expense tracking, a client portal, and basic time tracking, all at $0. For a freelancer or 2–3 person shop that's a complete billing stack for nothing, with a path into Zoho Books when you need full accounting.

The honest limitation: the time tracking is invoicing-tool grade — manual entries, per-project timers, no team capacity view, no approval flow, and nothing that catches the hours nobody logged. It bills the hours you hand it and can't help with the ones you lost, which is exactly where underbilling quietly compounds. Only need the occasional invoice with no subscription? A free invoice generator covers that.

How to choose the best time tracking software for agencies

Four questions settle this faster than any feature matrix.

1. Where does your work already leave a trace? Google Calendar and chat → calendar-based capture is nearly free; we compared the two in calendar-based vs manual time tracking. PM tasks → Teamwork or Scoro keeps the context. Nowhere → you need a timer plus real team buy-in.
2. Who approves hours before a client sees them? If an invoice can be disputed, you want an explicit approval step between capture and billing — and more than one tool here gates it behind the top plan.
3. What's the real monthly bill? Multiply seats by the tier with the features you actually need, not the entry tier. A 10-person team pays $90/month on Toggl Starter and about $500/month on Scoro Performance. Both can be right — they solve different problems.
4. What will your best people tolerate? Timers demand daily discipline; activity tracking demands real consent. Calendar-based tools just need the calendar hygiene most agencies already have.

Where to start

If your agency runs on Google Workspace and bills by the hour, the shortest path to accurate invoices is the calendar your team already maintains. Try Stintt free — connect a calendar, watch a week of timesheets draft themselves, approve what's right, and send an invoice built from hours you can defend. No timers to forget.