Tracking
How do you track time for multiple clients?
Give every client — or better, every distinct engagement — its own project, and let only one clock run at a time. Switching client means punching out of one and into the other, which takes a second and makes the split a fact rather than an estimate. The alternative, reconstructing a four-client day from memory, is where most billing errors are born.
Why
The split between clients has to be made at the moment of switching, because that is the only moment you actually know it. An hour later the boundary is soft; a day later it is fiction. A tracker that stops the running session automatically when you start another one enforces this without you having to remember, and removes the single most common tracking error there is: two overlapping timers.
Do this
- One project per client, or per engagement where a client has several.
- Punch out of one before punching into the next, or use a tracker that does it for you.
- Order the list so the projects you are live on sit at the top and are one tap away.
- Give each session a one-line note; on a multi-client day it is what tells the sessions apart later.
Avoid this
- One catch-all project with client names buried in the notes.
- Running two timers 'because the work overlaps' — it does not, your attention does not split.
- Batching the day's switches into an end-of-day reconstruction.
- Keeping finished clients in the list until it is too long to scan.
What it looks like in the log
The same advice, as the row a tracked session actually leaves behind.
Alder & Finch — brand guidelines
- Punched in
- 14:02
- Previous
- Kestrel, stopped 14:02
- Running
- 1h 12m
All of this is easier when the hours were written down as they happened. Punch O'Clock is a free tracker that does it in one tap, works offline, and exports the range you are billing.
Free. No ads, and no account unless you want sync.
Related questions
What if I genuinely work on two clients at once?
You do not, and neither does anyone else — attention is serial even when the calendar is not. What actually happens is rapid switching, and the honest record of that is a series of short sessions. If a piece of work genuinely benefits two clients, agree in advance how it is split rather than double-billing it.
Should each client be one project or several?
Several, if they commission distinct pieces of work. A project per engagement lets you answer 'what did the rebuild cost?' rather than only 'what did this client cost?', and that first question is the one that improves your next quote.