RescueTime Time Tracking to the Rescue

Maximize your productivity and billing by streamlining managing work hours completed with RescueTime. As a freelancer or small business owner, managing your time effectively isn’t just about staying organized – it’s the bedrock of your business success. Time tracking not only helps you stay focused but also ensures that every minute you spend working is accurately accounted for and billed. This is where RescueTime, a powerful time management tool, becomes invaluable. Make billing simpler with RescueTime.

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What is RescueTime?

RescueTime is a robust time-tracking application that runs in the background on your computer or mobile device. It automatically records the time you spend on different applications and websites, giving you an accurate picture of your workday and productivity levels. This is great for managing your time but even better for counting the minutes and hours you have spent on billable services. Tracking your time efficiently means billing effectively.

How Can RescueTime Help You With Client Work?

Understand Your Work Habits

Before you can bill your clients accurately, you need to understand how you’re spending your time. RescueTime provides detailed reports that show you exactly where your time goes each day. This data can be a real eye-opener, highlighting potential distractions and pinpointing your most productive hours. Improve your focus by automating your time tracking.

Bill Clients Accurately

With RescueTime, you can categorize activities into different client projects. This feature allows you to report exactly how much time you’ve spent on each project, ensuring that you bill your clients accurately for the work done. No more guesstimating or undercharging for your valuable time, and you can always provide detailed timesheets to your clients as a courtesy or in cases of differences of expectations versus outcomes. By providing a breakdown of your time, clients can see exactly what they are being charged for, which builds trust and transparency.

Set and Achieve Goals

Setting goals is crucial for productivity. RescueTime lets you set daily or weekly goals for how you want to spend your time. For instance, you can allocate a certain number of hours per week on a client project and RescueTime will help you stay on track to meet these goals.

Improve Productivity

By analyzing your daily patterns, you can identify which tasks are eating up your time and adjust accordingly. RescueTime’s Focus Sessions can also help you eliminate distractions by blocking time-wasting websites during your work hours, ensuring you stay focused on your client’s work. At the end of each focus session, RescueTime will provide you with data on how well you stayed on track and how much work you completed during the session.

Create Professional Invoices

Although RescueTime is not a billing software, the detailed reports it generates can be used to create invoices. A downside is that the program doesn’t have professional project management features, including geolocation, billing, invoicing, and project time tracking. You will need to add the geolocation manually if relevant, and if their invoicing tools don’t meet your needs, subscribe to QuickBooks for the billing, invoicing, and tracking details of the project’s time. QuickBooks is also great to have to keep your expenses for profit and loss organized and all in one easy place for your accountant to file your business taxes.

Optimize Client Communication

RescueTime can help you schedule check-ins or updates with clients during your most productive times. This ensures you’re communicating effectively and providing updates when you’re at your peak mental state.

Integrating RescueTime with Other Tools

To streamline your workflow even further, RescueTime integrates with various billing and project management tools. This means you can export your time-tracking data directly to your preferred invoicing software to bill your clients seamlessly.

For small business owners and freelancers, time is not just money – it’s the currency of trust and reputation with your clients. RescueTime helps you to maximize your productivity, provide accurate billing, and foster transparent relationships with your clients. It’s an essential tool for anyone looking to take control of their time and elevate their business.

Pricing

RescueTime offers a free version called Lite and a paid Premium version.

Lite: This free plan includes personalized Focus Time goals, time tracking, and weekly reports.

Premium: At $12 USD/month, this plan contains Lite features plus calendar and music integration, history reports, and warmups for Focus Sessions. Get a better price when paying annually ($78), which breaks down to just $6.50 a month.

We work with a few freelancers and like to outline and review many tools that work well for freelancers to optimize the great work they do. We have an affiliate link for RescueTime*, so if you’re in the market for this service and find it to be a good tool to maximize your work day and time tracking for billing, please use our link to help support this website and the fantastic people who create and run it. FreshBooks is another option like QuickBooks; we have an affiliate link if you’re interested.

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