Most time tracking software wasn't built with service businesses in mind. The tools that dominate the market are either designed for freelancers logging hours on a laptop, or for enterprise teams with a dedicated IT department and a six-month implementation budget. If you run a consultancy, agency, or professional services firm with 20 to 100 staff, you're probably sitting somewhere in the middle — too big for the basic stuff, too small (or too sensible) for the enterprise stuff.
This post is for operations leads, finance managers, and practice directors who are evaluating time tracking tools for a services team. We'll cover what actually matters for this kind of business, then walk through how the main options measure up.
Before looking at specific tools, it helps to be clear about what you're actually solving for. The requirements for a consulting firm are different from those of a construction crew or a solo freelancer, and a lot of the comparison content out there doesn't make that distinction.
Billable and non-billable time, tracked separately. Service businesses live on billable utilisation. You need to know not just how many hours were worked, but how many were billable — and whether that data is accurate enough to invoice on. Tools that blur this line, or make it awkward to separate, create downstream problems in finance.
Timesheet approval workflows. When hours flow into invoices, accuracy matters. Most teams of any meaningful size need a review step — someone checking entries before they're locked and billed. This sounds basic, but a surprising number of tools either lack it or bolt it on as an afterthought.
Visibility at the team level, not just the individual. A manager needs to see who's logged what, across which clients and projects. Individual timers are fine for freelancers. For a team of 30, you need reporting that lets you spot gaps, flag discrepancies, and understand how hours are distributing across your portfolio.
Capacity and resource planning. Time tracking is retrospective by nature. The more useful question is often forward-looking: who has capacity next week, and can we take on this new project without burning someone out? Tools that connect logged time to forward planning are considerably more useful than ones that only tell you what already happened.
Integration with your accounting system. If your timesheets don't connect to Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB, or whatever you're using for invoicing, you're either doing manual reconciliation or accepting the risk of errors in billing. Neither is good. Native accounting integration is a non-negotiable for most finance teams.
Harvest is one of the most established time tracking tools on the market and has earned that position. It's clean, well-designed, and genuinely easy to use. The core flow — log time, review timesheets, create invoices — works well, and the breadth of integrations (Asana, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, and many others) means it fits into most existing tech stacks without friction.
Where Harvest runs into limitations for growing service teams is around resourcing and planning. Harvest Forecast, which handles capacity planning, is a separate product billed separately — it doesn't come bundled with your Harvest subscription. For a team that wants timesheets and resource planning in one connected view, that separation adds cost and creates a data gap between what was logged and what was planned.
Reporting in Harvest is solid but not deep. You can pull utilisation and project budget data, but detailed audit trails — who submitted when, what was changed — are limited, which can be a problem if you're in a compliance-conscious environment. Pricing is $12 USD per user per month (paid annually) for the main plan, with Forecast billed on top.
Best for: Teams that prioritise ease of use and invoicing, and don't need native capacity planning.
Toggl Track is the go-to recommendation for freelancers and small teams, and for good reason. The free plan is genuinely useful, the timer works from anywhere (browser extension, mobile, desktop), and setup takes minutes rather than days. It has clean reporting and handles the basics — billable rates, project budgets, client breakdowns — without any bloat.
The limitation for service teams is that Toggl Track is fundamentally an individual productivity tool. Timesheet approval workflows, resource scheduling, and accounting integrations are absent or limited, depending on which plan you're on. It's excellent at telling you where time went after the fact. It doesn't help you plan where time should go before the week starts.
Pricing starts free for up to 5 users, then moves to $9 per user per month (billed annually) for the Starter plan. The price-to-simplicity ratio is good; the depth isn't there for professional services operations.
Best for: Small teams or individuals who need reliable time logging and reporting without complexity.
Clockify is the most widely used free time tracking tool available, and that free tier is genuinely unlimited — no cap on users, projects, or clients. For teams on a tight budget that need basic time logging and reporting, it's hard to argue against starting here.
In practice, Clockify is best suited to teams where individual tracking is the priority and team-level oversight is secondary. The core timer and reporting work well. Timesheet approval is available on paid plans. The interface is functional but not particularly refined, and some users report inconsistencies with the automatic time tracking feature. Accounting integrations are limited compared to Harvest.
Where Clockify gets more interesting is at scale — the paid tiers add features like GPS tracking and screenshots, which are useful for field-based teams but largely irrelevant for desk-based service businesses. For a professional services firm, the free plan covers the basics, but you'll likely hit its ceiling as the team grows and reporting needs become more specific.
Paid plans start at around $3.99 per user per month (billed annually).
Best for: Teams that need free, basic time tracking and don't yet require approval workflows or accounting integration.
Hubstaff is a time tracking and workforce management tool built around visibility into how distributed teams spend their time. It does time tracking, GPS location, project budgeting, and payroll integrations — and it goes further than most with optional features like screenshots, app usage tracking, and activity monitoring.
For service businesses with remote or field-based staff, some of that visibility is genuinely useful. Hubstaff handles timesheet management and reporting reasonably well, and the payroll integrations (QuickBooks, Gusto, Wise) are a practical feature for teams managing contractors or global staff.
The monitoring features are worth thinking through carefully before adopting them, though. Screenshots and activity tracking can create friction with office-based or professional staff who aren't accustomed to that level of oversight, and some of those features raise legitimate privacy questions depending on your jurisdiction. If your team is desk-based and you're primarily solving for timesheet accuracy and billing visibility, Hubstaff's monitoring capabilities are likely more than you need — and may introduce more complexity than they resolve.
Pricing starts at around $7 per user per month (billed annually) for the Starter plan.
Best for: Distributed or field-based teams that need time tracking alongside location tracking and payroll integration.
Paymo started as a time tracker and has since grown to include project management, task boards, invoicing, and resource scheduling. That breadth is both its strength and its weakness.
On the plus side, Paymo includes resource scheduling natively — you can see team availability and allocate work without needing a separate tool. Invoicing is built in. There's a free plan for solo users, and paid plans start around $9.90 per user per month.
The downside is complexity. The more features a tool adds, the harder it becomes to navigate, and Paymo reflects that tension. Some users find the interface cluttered; the timesheet approval flow exists but isn't as clean as dedicated time tracking tools. For smaller service teams, the feature set may be more than you need. For larger teams, the reporting depth may be less than you need.
Best for: Small to mid-sized teams that want a broad feature set in a single tool and are willing to spend time learning it.
Projectworks is a professional services management platform built specifically for the consulting and services market — a different positioning than the general-purpose tools above. It covers timesheets, resourcing, project financials, and reporting in a genuinely integrated way, and it's well-regarded among mid-sized professional services firms in ANZ.
The trade-off is price and complexity. Projectworks is positioned at the enterprise end of the mid-market, with pricing around $30 per user per month, and the platform takes time to configure properly for your business. For a 20-person firm, the overhead may outweigh the benefit. For a 100-person firm, it may be justified.
Best for: Established professional services firms that need deep project financial management and can absorb higher per-user costs.
Ponyrider is a newer player in this space, built specifically for service-based teams that have outgrown basic time trackers but don't need the complexity of enterprise tools like Projectworks. The platform connects timesheets, capacity planning, forecasting, and accounting integration in a single view.
The core product covers the key requirements for service teams: billable and non-billable tracking, timesheet approval workflows, visibility across people and projects, real-time utilisation dashboards, and direct integration with Xero, QuickBooks, and MYOB. Capacity planning is built in — not a separate add-on — so the data flowing forward into resource decisions is the same data coming in from logged time.
Because Ponyrider launched recently, it doesn't have the market tenure of Harvest or Toggl Track. What it does have is a tighter focus on the specific use case — professional services teams of 20 to 100 staff — and pricing that's more accessible than the enterprise tier: $15 per user per month, with a 30-day free trial and no credit card required.
Best for: Growing service-based teams that want timesheets, capacity planning, and accounting integration in one connected platform without enterprise-level complexity or cost.
The right tool depends on where your team is right now and what you're trying to fix.
If your main problem is that people aren't logging time at all, start with something simple. Clockify costs nothing to get started. Toggl Track is equally low friction. Adoption is the first hurdle, and a tool nobody uses because it's too complicated is worse than a basic one everyone uses.
If you're logging time but the data isn't reliable — entries are late, inaccurate, or disconnected from invoicing — you need approval workflows and accounting integration. Harvest handles this well. So does Ponyrider if you also want resourcing in the same platform.
If you have a distributed or field-based workforce and need location visibility alongside time tracking, Hubstaff is worth evaluating. If your team is desk-based, its monitoring features are probably more than you need.
If you're trying to get ahead of capacity problems rather than just report on them after the fact, you need a tool that connects historical time data to forward-looking planning. That's where Harvest starts to show its limits (unless you also buy Forecast separately), and where Paymo, Projectworks, and Ponyrider have more to offer.
Most teams in the 20–100 person range find they outgrow their first time tracking tool around the same time they're scaling — when the reporting starts to feel inadequate and spreadsheets start appearing alongside the software to fill the gaps. If you're at that point, it's worth evaluating whether a more connected platform would pay for itself in reduced admin and better billing accuracy.
Ponyrider offers a 30-day free trial with full platform access and no credit card required. You can start at ponyrider.studio.