drift stack /
003
Productivity
Time tracking that makes hours, billing, and contractor pay easier to keep straight.
Start with Toggl Track
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overview
Toggl Track is how we keep track of where our time actually goes, across client projects, contracts, and contractor work.
It combines straightforward time tracking with a calendar-first interface, project-specific billing rates, labor costs, and detailed reporting, giving us one place to track both the hours we bill and the hours we pay for.
why it's in our stack
See the entire week at a glance, then add, edit, resize, and move time entries directly from the calendar.
Assign different hourly rates to individual projects, even when multiple projects belong to the same client.
Tracked hours and project rates are calculated together, so we always know how much billable work has accumulated before invoicing.
Contractors track their own hours, giving both sides a transparent record of what was worked and when.
Assign labor costs to team members so tracked hours can also show what contractor work costs the studio.
Filter time by client, project, team member, or date range and export detailed reports and timesheets when it’s time to bill or pay someone.
Freelancers, studios, consultants, and small teams that need time tracking to connect directly to real money.
our experience
The calendar is what originally made Toggl click for us. Instead of time disappearing into a list of timers, we can see the entire week visually, add entries after the fact, move things around, and quickly spot where our time went. For contracts that require hourly tracking, we can give every project its own rate and Toggl keeps a running total of the billable value for us.
We also use it with contractors. They track their hours directly in Toggl, we can see those hours as they come in, and reports give us a shared record when it’s time to pay them. Labor costs let us attach a cost to their time too, so we can see what we owe without doing the math separately. That transparency is useful on both sides.
And then there’s idle detection, which has saved us from more than a few accidental overnight timers. If you walk away with a timer still running, Toggl can detect the inactivity and ask what you want to do with that idle time instead of leaving you to figure out the next morning whether you stopped working at 1:47 or 3:12 a.m.
We chose Toggl because time tracking already sucks. The software doing it doesn’t need to suck too.
good to know
PROS
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Clean, genuinely pleasant UI for something as boring as time tracking
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Calendar view makes an entire day or week easy to understand visually
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Different projects can have different billable rates
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Automatically calculates the value of tracked billable time
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Labor costs help calculate what contractor time is costing you
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Detailed reports and exports make client billing and contractor payments easier
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Idle detection catches forgotten timers
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Works across web, desktop, mobile, and browser extensions
CONSIDERATIONS
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The free plan is fairly limited if you need Toggl for actual client billing rather than basic personal time tracking. Billable rates start on Starter, while labor costs and profitability reporting require Premium.
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Pricing is per user, so adding contractors or a larger team can make the paid plans add up quickly.
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There are a lot of reporting and profitability features you may never need if all you want is a simple timer.
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Toggl can handle billing data, but we don’t use it as our invoicing system. We keep invoicing in Found instead.