Why time tracking is your biggest untapped profit lever
As an accountant, consultant, or service professional, your time is your product. Yet most service teams leave money on the table. Studies show professional firms lose 15-20% of billable revenue annually due to untracked hours, scope creep, and poor project visibility.
Time tracking isn't just administrative busywork. It's strategic intelligence. The best firms use it to identify which clients are actually profitable, which projects underpriced themselves, and where team inefficiencies hide. For hourly billing, fixed-price projects with hourly breakdowns, or even value-based services, the right time tracking system directly impacts your bottom line.
In this guide, we compare the three best time tracking platforms for accountants, consultants, and service leaders: Toggl Track, Clockify, and TMetric.
Toggl Track: purpose-built for professional services
Toggl was born in 2006 from the same frustration you probably feel. Two consultants couldn't accurately track their hours for billing. After nearly 20 years and thousands of professional services teams, Toggl [https://toggl.com] has become the standard for firms that need serious time intelligence.
Strengths:
• Enterprise-grade reporting: Filter by project, client, team member, tag, or any custom dimension. See profitability by client in real-time dashboards.
• Invoicing integration: Export tracked time directly into invoice templates or connect to QuickBooks, FreshBooks, Wave, and other accounting platforms via API.
• Timeline view: See your entire day's work in a visual timeline. Perfect for consultants billing multiple clients in a single day.
• Cross-platform: Browser, desktop (Mac/Windows), and mobile apps with offline support. Start a timer on your phone, seamlessly continue on desktop.
• Integrations ecosystem: Zapier, API access, and direct connectors to most business software.
Pricing: €10-99/month depending on team size. Free plan available with limited features.
Drawbacks:
• Slightly higher cost than Clockify
• Interface can overwhelm first-time users (lots of options means lots of menu depth)
• Requires some onboarding to use advanced features effectively
Best for? Established consulting firms (5+ people), mid-size accounting practices, project-based businesses where billing accuracy directly impacts profitability.
Clockify: unlimited free users, powerful when you scale
Clockify disrupted the market with a simple promise: unlimited free team members on the free plan. This makes it the cheapest entry point [https://clockify.me] for experimentation.
Strengths:
• Unlimited free users: Every team member can track time for free. Premium unlocks advanced reporting, timesheet approvals, and other features.
• Timesheet approval workflow: Managers approve submitted timesheets before they're locked in. Essential for firms managing distributed teams or requiring accuracy checks.
• Activity monitoring (optional): Screenshots, idle detection, and activity levels for remote teams needing verification.
• Kiosk mode: Physical clock-in terminals for office-based teams.
• Invoicing: Supported, though less automated than Toggl.
Pricing: Free (unlimited users, basic tracking). Premium starts at €10/user/month.
Drawbacks:
• Reporting is more basic than Toggl (fewer filtering and segmentation options)
• User interface feels unintuitive in places
• Advanced features Toggl includes standard cost extra here
Best for? Early-stage consulting firms, rapidly growing teams seeking cost efficiency, remote-heavy operations needing activity verification.
TMetric: the integration specialist
TMetric is less famous than Toggl or Clockify, but has carved out a strong niche as "the connection layer" for teams drowning in SaaS tools. If your team runs projects in ClickUp, Monday.com, or Asana, TMetric [https://tmetric.com] shines by bringing time tracking into those platforms.
Strengths:
• Deep project management integrations: ClickUp, Monday.com, Jira, Asana, Todoist. Log time directly in your project task, not a separate app.
• Smart pricing: €7-10/user/month. Good value for what you get.
• Offline tracking and team activity: Useful for distributed teams.
• Project profitability insights: See which projects and clients actually made money.
Drawbacks:
• Smaller community, fewer case studies and reviews
• Customer support response can be slower
• Fewer accounting software integrations (QuickBooks, FreshBooks) compared to Toggl
Best for? Teams heavily invested in modern project management platforms who want time tracking to live within those tools, not as a separate system.
Head-to-head comparison: Toggl vs Clockify vs TMetric
How to choose the right tool for your firm
Ask yourself these questions:
1. How many team members? Clockify wins if you have many people to onboard. Toggl if advanced reporting is non-negotiable.
2. Which project tools do you already use? TMetric integrates beautifully with ClickUp and Monday.com. Toggl needs workarounds via Zapier.
3. How critical is invoicing? Toggl has the most sophisticated billing automation. Clockify requires more manual steps.
4. What's your budget? Clockify has the lowest total cost of ownership for large teams.
5. How distributed is your team? TMetric and Clockify include activity monitoring for remote verification. Toggl doesn't.
Deployment best practices
• Pilot with one team first: Don't roll out firm-wide immediately. Start with one department or practice group. Test for 2-4 weeks, gather feedback.
• Establish clear logging standards: How granular? By project? By client? By task type? Written guidelines prevent chaos.
• Integrate with existing systems: Connect to accounting software and project management tools. Spreadsheets and manual data entry create errors.
• Drive adoption: Show your team why tracking benefits them. More accurate billable hours. Better project visibility. Less firefighting. If they don't see the "why," they won't adopt it.
• Review data monthly: Time data only adds value if you act on it. Monthly profitability reviews where leadership discusses findings drives change.
The bottom line: time tracking is strategic, not administrative
The best time tracking tool is the one your team actually uses consistently. Toggl is gold for firms where billing accuracy directly impacts profitability. Clockify is perfect for resource-constrained growing firms. TMetric wins when you're already embedded in modern project tools.
Regardless of which tool you choose, establish disciplined time tracking now. The firms that do invoice 15-20% more than comparable competitors because they lose fewer billable hours and see exactly where profitability comes from.
Your opportunity is waiting. Start this week.
Ready to unlock more efficiency in your service business? Discover how Luniq [https://www.luniq.io/] helps professional service teams work smarter and bill better.
Sources
• Toggl - https://toggl.com
• Clockify - https://clockify.me
• TMetric - https://tmetric.com