Agency time tracking software: 6 tools I've tested for client work

Every agency runs on time. Whether you bill hourly, use retainers, or run fixed-fee projects, knowing where your team's hours actually go is the difference between profitable delivery and slow-motion margin erosion. Before I joined Teamwork.com, I spent years at agencies wrestling with exactly this problem: timesheets submitted days late, hours logged to the wrong project, and month-end reviews that felt more like forensic accounting than business management.

The real cost isn't the missing data. It's the decisions you can't make without it. According to McKinsey, agencies plan for 85% utilization but only deliver 68% on average. That gap represents real revenue sitting on the table. Our own Sprint to AI report found that 34% of agency respondents cite time tracking as a specific tool shortfall, and 58% are juggling three to five separate tools to manage what should be a single workflow.

I've reviewed dozens of time tracking tools over the years. Here are six that stood out for agency work, starting with the one I use every day.

What is agency time tracking software?

Agency time tracking software is a tool that records how team members spend their working hours across client projects, tasks, and internal activities. It answers the questions that keep agency leaders up at night:

• How many billable hours did we actually deliver this week?

• Which projects are eating more time than we scoped?

• Are we staffing the right people on the right accounts?

• Where is non-billable admin dragging down our utilization rate?

The best agency time trackers go beyond a simple clock. They connect hours to budgets, flag overruns before they become write-offs, and feed data into profitability reports that help you price smarter next quarter.

How I reviewed and selected these tools

I evaluated each tool from the perspective of someone who's managed client portfolios at agencies of various sizes. Here's what mattered most:

• Billable vs. non-billable tracking: Can you tag time as billable or internal without extra clicks?

• Budget visibility: Does the tool show real-time spend against project budgets?

• Ease of adoption: Will your team actually use it, or will you spend your Mondays chasing timesheets?

• Reporting depth: Can you pull utilization, profitability, and capacity reports without exporting to a spreadsheet?

• Integrations: Does it connect to your existing project management, invoicing, and accounting stack?

• AI and automation: Does the tool use AI to reduce manual entry, suggest allocations, or flag issues proactively?

• Pricing transparency: Is the pricing clear, and does it scale sensibly for growing teams?

• Agency-specific fit: Was the tool built with client work in mind, or is time tracking an afterthought?

Quick glance: 6 best agency time tracking tools

Teamwork.com

Teamwork.com is an AI-powered project and resource management platform built specifically for client work. It connects project management, time tracking, resource scheduling, budgets, and profitability reporting in one place.

What sets it apart for agencies is that time tracking isn't a separate module you bolt on. It's woven into every project, every task, and every budget. When a team member logs time, that data flows straight into your profitability reports without any manual syncing.

Best features

• Built-in stop-start timer: Track time in the background while you work, add quick descriptions, and mark entries as billable with one click. If your team prefers logging later, the bulk timesheet view handles that too.

• Budget tracking with real-time alerts: Set time and cost budgets per project and get alerts before you overspend. No more month-end surprises when a project has quietly gone over scope.

• Automated timesheet reminders: Our Client Work Report found that teams need up to five reminders to complete timesheets. Teamwork.com automates those nudges so managers stop spending their mornings chasing entries.

• Profitability reports tied to time data: See exactly which clients and projects are profitable in real time, not after the invoice goes out. Billable and cost rates flow directly from logged hours into margin calculations.

• TeamworkAI for smarter decisions: Let AI handle the admin that slows your team down. The AI Project Wizard turns scattered briefs into fully structured projects in two to three minutes. The AI Smart Scheduler resolves resource conflicts automatically, and AI Teammates like Scout (personal productivity), Flo (project tracking), and Remi (resource planning) work alongside your team to surface issues before they escalate. The AI Forecaster delivers instant profitability predictions so you can spot margin risks early.

• Resource scheduling and utilization: See who's overbooked, who has capacity, and how close your team is to target utilization, all without leaving the platform. The AI Utilization Summary matches tasks to people based on skills and availability.

When Farotech, a digital marketing agency, consolidated their scattered time tracking workflows into Teamwork.com, they brought project delivery and time data together in one view for the first time.

Limitations

• The depth of features can take new users a week or two to fully explore. The learning curve reflects the platform's breadth, not poor design.

• Some advanced reporting views are reserved for higher-tier plans.

Pricing

Pricing:

• Free: $0/user/month (up to 5 users, 5 projects)

• Basics: $9.99/user/month (billed yearly)

• Accelerate: $24.99/user/month (billed yearly)

• Optimize: Custom pricing

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

All paid plans include TeamworkAI.

Ratings and reviews

Teamwork.com holds a 4.4/5 rating on G2 from over 1,200 reviews.

"Teamwork is awesome when it comes to client management, time tracking, billing and reporting. Great team support too." — Brady C., Operations Manager, G2

Harvest

Harvest is a well-established time tracking and invoicing tool that's been around since 2006. It's built for teams that want a clean, focused interface for logging hours and turning them into invoices.

What stood out to me about Harvest is the simplicity of its timer workflow. Starting and stopping time across projects takes one click, and the browser extension makes it accessible from almost anywhere. For agencies that bill hourly and need a direct path from time entries to invoices, it handles that loop smoothly. From a delivery management perspective, this tends to work particularly well for small agencies or studio teams where one person handles both project delivery and invoicing — the tight time-to-invoice loop is genuinely useful when you're not running a separate finance function.

The reporting layer is solid for tracking team capacity and identifying where hours are going. The forecasting add-on (Harvest Forecast) gives you a timeline view for planning future work, though it's a separate product with its own pricing.

Where Harvest starts to show its limits is when you need deeper project management alongside your time data. It tracks hours well, but it doesn't manage tasks, dependencies, or resource allocation in the way a platform built for client delivery would. You'll likely pair it with a separate PM tool, which means your time and project data live in different systems.

Limitations

• No built-in project management, task boards, or Gantt charts. Time tracking and project delivery stay separate.

• Forecast (resource planning) is a separate paid product.

• Usage-based billing for projects and invoices can make costs less predictable as your agency grows.

Pricing

Pricing:

• Free: $0 (1 user, 2 projects)

• Teams: $9/seat/month (billed yearly); $11/seat/month (billed monthly)

• Enterprise: $14/seat/month (billed yearly); $17.50/seat/month (billed monthly)

Clockify

Clockify is a free time tracking tool that offers unlimited users and projects on its free tier. For agencies watching every dollar, that starting price is hard to ignore.

The free plan covers the basics well: timers, manual time entry, and basic reporting. Having used it early in my career to track hours across freelance projects, I found the interface straightforward and the onboarding minimal. You can be logging time within minutes of signing up.

Where Clockify earns its keep for growing agencies is the Standard plan, which adds invoicing, time-off tracking, and timesheet approvals. The Pro plan layers on scheduling, budgeting, expenses, and GPS tracking. Each tier adds meaningful features without forcing you onto the most expensive plan.

The trade-off is that the free plan's reporting is basic. You won't get the profitability analysis or budget-vs-actual views that agency finance teams need for real decision-making. And because Clockify isn't built around client work specifically, connecting time data to project scopes, client budgets, and margin calculations requires manual effort or third-party integrations.

Limitations

• Free plan reporting is too basic for agency-level profitability analysis.

• No native project management; time data and project delivery stay disconnected.

• AI features are limited compared to platforms built for client work.

Pricing

Pricing:

• Free: $0 (unlimited users)

• Basic: $3.99/user/month (billed yearly)

• Standard: $5.49/user/month (billed yearly)

• Pro: $7.99/user/month (billed yearly)

• Enterprise: $11.99/user/month (billed yearly)

Tick

Tick takes a budget-first approach to time tracking. Rather than starting with timers and building toward reporting, Tick puts your project budget front and center. Every time someone logs hours, you see a running total against the budget in real time.

For small agencies running a handful of projects at a time, this approach cuts through the noise. You don't need to pull a report to know if a project is on track. The project card shows you instantly. From a project delivery standpoint, this tends to work well for agencies billing on fixed-fee retainers where budget protection matters more than utilization reporting — the immediate visual of hours consumed vs. hours remaining is something teams actually glance at daily rather than pulling a separate report.

The interface is deliberately minimal. There's no project management layer, no resource scheduling, and no invoicing. That focus makes it quick to adopt but limits its usefulness as your agency scales.

Tick works well as a supplemental tool paired with a project management platform. On its own, it won't give you the utilization data, profitability views, or resource planning that mid-size agencies need.

Limitations

• No project management, task tracking, or resource planning capabilities.

• No invoicing or billing features built in.

• Limited reporting depth for agencies that need utilization and profitability analysis.

• Flat-rate pricing may not suit very small teams.

Pricing

Pricing:

• Free: $0 (1 project)

• 10 Projects: $19/month (flat rate)

• 30 Projects: $49/month (flat rate)

• 60 Projects: $79/month (flat rate)

• Unlimited: $149/month (flat rate)

TimeCamp

TimeCamp combines time tracking with automatic activity detection, capturing how you spend your day based on the apps and websites you use. For agency teams that forget to start timers, this background approach catches hours that would otherwise go unlogged.

The automatic tracking feature stands out because it suggests time entries based on your actual computer activity. You review and approve entries rather than creating them from scratch. For teams that have resisted manual time tracking, this passive approach lowers the adoption barrier.

TimeCamp also includes invoicing, attendance tracking, and basic budgeting. The pricing is competitive, with a free tier for unlimited users and paid plans starting lower than most competitors.

The challenge for agencies is that automatic tracking works best for desk-based work. If your team splits time between meetings, client sites, and creative work away from a screen, the auto-tracked data will have gaps. The reporting is functional but not as deep as what you'll find in platforms built specifically for client profitability analysis.

Limitations

• Automatic tracking accuracy depends on desk-based, computer-focused workflows.

• AI time tracking suggestions are billed by token usage, adding variable cost.

• Profitability and resource planning features are limited compared to purpose-built agency platforms.

Pricing

Pricing:

• Free: $0 (unlimited users, basic features)

• Starter: $3.99/user/month (billed yearly)

• Premium: $6.99/user/month (billed yearly)

• Ultimate: $9.99/user/month (billed yearly)

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Timely

Timely takes AI-powered automatic time tracking further than most competitors. Its Memory feature runs in the background, recording a private timeline of everything you work on throughout the day. At the end of the day, you review the AI-drafted timesheet and approve it.

After evaluating Timely's approach, what impressed me most was how it reframes time tracking as something that happens to you rather than something you have to remember to do. For creative teams and strategists who lose track of hours during deep-focus work, this passive model recovers time that manual tracking consistently misses.

Higher tiers add project budgeting, team dashboards, and capacity planning. The Premium plan includes budget management and PM integrations. The Unlimited plan adds overtime tracking and broader capacity reporting.

Where Timely falls short for larger agencies is the user cap on lower plans (5 and 50 respectively). There's no built-in project management or profitability reporting, which reintroduces the multi-tool problem.

Limitations

• Starter plan capped at 5 users and 20 projects.

• No built-in project management, invoicing, or profitability tracking.

• Resource planning and capacity views are limited to the highest-tier plans.

• The AI timeline requires a learning period to categorize activities accurately.

Pricing

Pricing:

• Starter: $9/user/month (billed yearly); $11/user/month (billed monthly)

• Premium: $16/user/month (billed yearly); $20/user/month (billed monthly)

• Unlimited: $22/user/month (billed yearly); $28/user/month (billed monthly)

• Enterprise: Custom pricing

AI workflow automation vs. traditional automation

The difference between traditional and AI-powered time tracking matters more than most agencies realize. Traditional automation handles repetitive, rules-based tasks: starting timers when you open a project, sending reminders at set intervals, and auto-populating invoices from logged entries. Useful, but limited.

AI workflow automation goes further. Instead of following rigid rules, AI tools learn from patterns in your data to make suggestions, flag anomalies, and predict outcomes. At Teamwork.com, we built TeamworkAI to address exactly this gap.

For example, the AI Smart Scheduler doesn't just flag a resource conflict. It suggests a resolution based on team members' skills, availability, and current workload. Forrester research confirms that AI scheduling tools increase utilization by 5 to 10 percentage points. That's the difference between an agency running at 70% utilization and one hitting 80%, which translates directly to revenue.

The pattern we see across Teamwork.com customers is clear: agencies that connect AI to their time and resource data make faster staffing decisions, catch budget overruns earlier, and spend less time on the manual admin that drags down productivity. Our Value Beyond Price report found that 62% of agencies rely on time-based processes, making intelligent automation of those processes a direct lever for profitability.

Why Teamwork.com stands out for agency time tracking

Most time tracking tools do the basics well: start a timer, log an entry, run a report. What separates Teamwork.com is that time tracking lives inside the same platform where your team plans projects, schedules resources, and monitors profitability.

That integration eliminates the manual data stitching that plagues agencies running separate tools. When novi.digital scaled to managing 50+ clients, they relied on Teamwork.com to keep time, projects, and client communication connected in one place. Strencom, an IT services firm, saved over four days of admin work per week by consolidating disconnected workflows into the platform.

Here's what that connected approach looks like in practice. Track your billable hours against project budgets in real time. Use our utilization rate calculator to benchmark your team's performance (our customers improve utilization by an average of 21.8%). Plan resources with the team utilization tracker and set up new client projects in minutes with our client work time tracking template.

And then there's TeamworkAI. While other tools are adding AI as a surface-level feature, we've built it into the core of how agencies plan, deliver, and measure client work. The AI Project Wizard, AI Smart Scheduler, AI Forecaster, and AI Teammates (Scout, Flo, and Remi) each target a specific bottleneck in the agency workflow. The result is less time on admin, faster decisions, and better visibility into where your agency's time and money are actually going.

Whether you're a five-person creative shop or a 200-person agency management operation, the fundamentals are the same: know where your hours go, protect your margins, and give your team the tools to focus on the work that actually matters to clients. The right agency time tracking software ties together billable utilization, resource scheduling, project profitability, and budget visibility — and when those pieces connect, your agency stops guessing and starts growing.

FAQs about agency time tracking software