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The billable-hours tracker: catch every hour and bill it, without the per-seat SaaS

You click a button when you start work on a client job and click again when you finish. At the end of the month, one more click turns the tracked hours into an invoice. Small jobs stop disappearing.

Log time in two clicks, turn it into an EN 16931 invoice you own — no per-user Toggl or Harvest fee

If you sell your time, your revenue is only as complete as your timesheet — and the hours that go missing are always the small ones. This is the self-hosted way to catch every one and turn it into an invoice you own, landing the same year Belgium made structured e-invoices mandatory for B2B.

The architecture

One box, one container plus a database. The tracker owns the truth about who worked on what; the invoice is a view of the billable slice of that truth. Keeping capture and billing in the same tool is the point — the moment those two live in separate systems, hours fall down the gap between them.

The problem

Bill by the hour and you leak money in five-minute pieces: the quick call, the two-line email, the fix you did before lunch and forgot. Each one is small; over twelve months they add up to real work you did and never charged for. The usual fix is a tracker like Toggl or Harvest. It works — but it charges for every person on the team, every month, and keeps your client hours on someone else's server. And there is a second reason the tool you pick now matters more than it did a year ago: since 1 January 2026, Belgian VAT-registered businesses must exchange structured e-invoices for domestic B2B — EN 16931, over the Peppol network — and a plain PDF no longer counts as an invoice for those transactions. So the tool has to do two jobs at once: capture the hour, and produce an invoice in the format the law now requires.

Tool choices — and why

Setup outline

1. Deploy Kimai from the official Docker image behind HTTPS on your own subdomain — track.yourbusiness.example. The compose file brings its own database; you do not wire one up by hand.
2. Model reality before logging a single hour: customers, projects, activities, and an hourly rate per project or per person. Decide the default billable flag.
3. Add your team as users with their own logins and rates. One person's hours at the wrong rate is a wrong invoice.
4. Log time daily, not weekly. The timer or a two-field manual entry takes seconds; a Friday reconstruction is exactly where the small tasks die. This habit is the whole game — the software only supports it.
5. (Optional) Install ActivityWatch on each laptop as the safety net for the afternoons someone forgets. It stays local; nothing leaves the machine.
6. Build one invoice template: issuer, VAT ID, bank account, tax rate, payment terms. Kimai ships PDF, DOCX and spreadsheet templates; the community template repo has the XRechnung XML for EN 16931.
7. For the Belgian B2B mandate: generate the EN 16931 invoice in Kimai, then transmit it through a certified Peppol access point. Kimai makes the structured file; the access point puts it on the network. These are two separate steps — plan for both.
8. Month-end ritual: filter to billable, not-yet-exported entries per client, create the invoice, mark the entries exported. Marking exported is what stops the same hour being billed on next month's invoice too.

Pitfalls — what goes wrong when you build this

Verified repos

Kimai — AGPL-3.0, 4.8k stars, active (July 2026)
Solidtime — AGPL-3.0, 8.8k stars, active (July 2026)
ActivityWatch — MPL-2.0, 18.3k stars, active (July 2026)