A Billing-First Timer Inside an Accounting Platform
FreshBooks doesn't sell time tracking as a standalone product, and that context matters for everything that follows in this review. The time tracking feature lives inside FreshBooks' cloud accounting platform, designed from the ground up to feed billable hours directly into invoices. For freelancers and small service businesses already managing their books in FreshBooks, that integration is the entire value proposition. We score FreshBooks Time Tracking 6.8 out of 10 for the time and attendance software category.
That score reflects a genuine tension. The time-to-invoice workflow is one of the smoothest you'll find anywhere. But when you evaluate FreshBooks purely as time and attendance software, the feature set doesn't reach the depth that dedicated platforms offer. How much that matters depends entirely on what you're trying to solve.
FreshBooks was founded in 2003 in Toronto, Canada, by Mike McDerment and Levi Cooperman. What started as an invoicing tool for a freelancer frustrated with Microsoft Word has grown into a cloud accounting platform used by more than 10 million people across 160 countries, with offices spanning Canada, Croatia, Mexico, the Netherlands, and the United States. The company employs roughly 400 to 500 people, reached unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation in 2021, and secured a $125 million debt financing round in March 2025 from Morgan Stanley. It's a well-capitalized, stable operation with more than two decades of history in the small business accounting space. That longevity matters when you're trusting a platform with your billing records.
How FreshBooks Handles Time Tracking
The core mechanic is simple: start a timer, assign it to a client or project, stop the timer, and the logged hours are ready to drop onto an invoice. FreshBooks offers this through three access points. The web dashboard provides a full time tracking interface with day, week, and month views for reviewing and editing entries. The mobile app for iOS and Android mirrors that functionality for tracking on the go. And the Chrome Timer extension lets you run a timer from any browser tab without logging into the main FreshBooks interface, which is especially useful if you're working across multiple web applications throughout the day.
Every time entry can be tagged as billable or non-billable, assigned to a specific client and project, categorized by service type, and annotated with notes describing the work performed. That level of tagging is adequate for most billing scenarios. Users managing several active client engagements report that the categorization keeps their invoicing clean without requiring excessive data entry on each time log. The Chrome Timer also integrates with project management tools including Asana, Basecamp, Trello, and Teamwork, so you can start tracking directly from where your tasks live.
The real payoff comes at billing time. Tracked hours flow into FreshBooks invoices with a single click, either as a summarized total or as a detailed line-by-line breakdown of time entries. You don't re-enter anything. You don't export a CSV and paste it somewhere else. The hours you tracked are already sitting inside the same system that generates your invoices, calculates taxes, and processes payments. For anyone who bills clients by the hour, that closed loop eliminates a category of administrative work that most people underestimate until it's gone.
FreshBooks also provides Time Entry Details Reports, which break down logged hours by team member, client, project, and date range. These reports export to PDF and Excel formats for sharing with clients or internal stakeholders. On the Premium plan, Project Profitability Reports layer in cost data to show whether a project is actually making money relative to the hours invested. That's a useful planning tool, though it's frustrating that it's gated behind the most expensive standard tier.
Team members can track their own time once invited to the account, and account owners can view and edit entries across the team from a centralized interface. Bulk editing is supported, so correcting a week of mis-categorized entries doesn't require opening each one individually. FreshBooks also supports retainer tracking, automatically applying logged time against a retainer balance when configured.
One interface detail worth calling out: the time entry screen doesn't clearly indicate whether you're logging against a project or directly against a client until you've already started the process. If you work with both project-based and retainer-based clients, you'll want to establish a naming convention early. It's a minor friction point, not a dealbreaker, but it can cause confusion in the first few weeks of use.
What FreshBooks Time Tracking Costs in Practice
FreshBooks doesn't charge separately for time tracking. It's included on every plan, starting with Lite. But because you're buying an entire accounting platform to get it, the effective cost of time tracking depends on which plan your business needs and how many people are using it.
The Lite plan runs $19 per month ($17.10 billed annually) and supports up to five billable clients. The Plus plan costs $33 per month ($29.70 annually) and raises the cap to 50 clients while adding proposals and recurring invoices. Premium, at $60 per month ($54 annually), removes the client limit entirely and adds Project Profitability Reports and accounts payable. Select is a custom-priced tier with a dedicated account manager and custom onboarding. All plans include the same time tracking functionality, with the exception of the profitability reporting exclusive to Premium.
Here's where the annual math gets real. A solo freelancer on the Plus plan pays $356.40 per year billed annually. That buys invoicing, expense tracking, time tracking, proposals, and basic reporting for up to 50 clients. If your business already needs FreshBooks for accounting, the time tracking is effectively free. You're not paying anything extra for it.
A team of five on the Plus plan changes the equation considerably. Each additional team member costs $11 per month regardless of plan tier, so four extra seats add $44 per month to the base price. The annual total climbs to $884.40. At that point, you're paying nearly $900 per year for an accounting platform with basic time tracking, and a team that size might benefit from features FreshBooks doesn't provide. A team of ten pushes the annual cost past $1,500. Compare that investment against what it buys, and you'll want to be sure the integrated invoicing workflow justifies the spend over a dedicated time tracking tool paired with separate accounting software.
FreshBooks frequently runs promotional pricing, including 60% off for the first three months. Those introductory offers reduce the initial commitment, but plan your annual budget around the standard rates.
The Right Fit (and the Wrong One)
Picture a marketing consultant who juggles eight to ten active client accounts, bills hourly for strategy sessions and content reviews, and handles their own books. They need to track how long they spend on each client, generate professional invoices tied to those hours, and keep their accounting organized for tax season. FreshBooks is built precisely for that person. The time tracking, invoicing, and expense management all live in one login, and the workflow from tracked hour to paid invoice takes seconds rather than the 15 to 20 minutes it takes when you're copying data between separate systems.
A small design agency with three team members billing across a dozen client projects fits well too. Everyone logs their hours in FreshBooks, the project lead reviews the entries, and invoices go out at the end of each billing cycle with accurate, detailed time breakdowns attached. The Chrome Timer makes it easy for the team to track time while working in browser-based design tools without context-switching.
Now picture a home healthcare company with 30 field caregivers who clock in at different patient locations each morning. The operations manager needs GPS verification of arrival times, overtime calculations for employees working more than 40 hours per week, manager approval on submitted timesheets before payroll runs, and shift scheduling visible to the whole team. FreshBooks can't do any of that. It's not a gap in the product so much as a different product category altogether.
The distinction matters because FreshBooks time tracking exists to serve billing, not workforce management. If your primary need is converting hours into invoices, the feature delivers. If your primary need is managing employee attendance, scheduling, and compliance, you need a different tool entirely.
Gaps to Know About
FreshBooks doesn't include timesheet approval workflows. When a team member logs time, it goes directly into the system with no review gate between entry and invoice. For solo practitioners or very small teams with high trust, that's fine. For businesses that need a manager to verify hours before billing, there's no built-in mechanism to enforce that step.
There's no automatic time tracking. If someone forgets to start the timer, they're relying on memory to create a manual entry after the fact. Dedicated time tracking tools increasingly offer passive tracking that records application and website usage in the background, giving users an activity timeline to build accurate entries from. FreshBooks requires active input every time.
Overtime calculations, shift scheduling, PTO tracking, and break enforcement are all absent. These capabilities fall squarely within the time and attendance category, and FreshBooks doesn't attempt them. The platform also lacks GPS or geofencing, which means there's no location-based clock-in verification for mobile or field-based workers.
The 2025 product updates focused almost entirely on the accounting side of the platform. Notable additions included Financial Lock to protect closed accounting periods, two-factor authentication for login security, Instant Payouts for faster payment processing, and expanded payroll capabilities through the Gusto-powered integration. Time tracking received no significant feature updates during the year, which suggests it isn't a current development priority for the FreshBooks team. The Chrome Timer extension did receive a quality-of-life improvement with persistent login, so users aren't repeatedly prompted to re-authenticate throughout the day.
Our Verdict on FreshBooks Time Tracking
FreshBooks time tracking does one thing exceptionally well: it connects logged hours to invoices inside an accounting platform that millions of small businesses already use. The interface is clean. The timer works reliably across web, mobile, and browser extension. The billing integration eliminates an entire layer of manual work that costs freelancers and small teams real money in unbilled or mis-billed hours every month. For a solo practitioner or a small team that bills clients by the hour and wants everything in one place, it's a practical, efficient choice that earns its keep by saving time on the billing side of your business.
The limitations are real but predictable. FreshBooks built its time tracking to serve its accounting customers, not to compete with dedicated time and attendance platforms. If your business has outgrown basic timer-and-invoice needs, if you need approval chains or overtime rules or location verification, you'll hit those boundaries quickly. The 6.8 score reflects a product that excels within its intended scope while falling short of what the broader time and attendance category demands. Know what you need before you buy, and FreshBooks won't disappoint you.