The short answer
- It has to show one thing first: which invoice is oldest and still unpaid. Everything else is comfort.
- If entering one invoice takes more than a minute, you will stop doing it by the third week.
- It must hold four dates per job: when you quoted, when you started, when you invoiced, when it was paid.
- It should open without an internet connection, because the day you most need your list is the day the wifi is down.
- Buy the smallest thing that does the job. A tracker you understand beats a tracker that impresses.
Nine questions to ask any tracker
- Can I see open invoices sorted by age, on one screen, without configuring anything first?
- Does it record what I did each time I chased one, and on what date?
- Can I add a job in under a minute, from a phone, without logging in three times?
- Does it show what a project actually earned me per hour, once the small jobs are counted?
- Can I export everything to a file I can still open in five years, without paying again?
- Does it hold my expenses against the job, or will I reconcile two systems every month?
- Can I write a note about a client that I will still understand in six months?
- If the company closed tomorrow, would my data still be mine?
- Is the price once, or a subscription that will outlive my use of it?
The one-week test
Buy nothing for a week. Run the test first, in whatever you already use, even if that is a plain sheet. Log every new job, every invoice and every payment for seven days, and time how long keeping it current takes on an ordinary day.
The number you are looking for is that time. If it is small, what you have is good enough, and the honest answer is that you need to buy nothing. If it is large, write down exactly which step is slow. That step is the requirement you are shopping for - not the longest feature list.
- A week is long enough to see whether the habit survives a bad day.
- Note the moment you avoided updating it. That moment is the real problem, and it is worth more than any review you could read.
One number belongs beside the tracker, not inside it
Before you choose software, work out what an hour of your time has to cost for the work to be worth taking. The free rate calculator takes your own numbers - what you need to take home, your fixed costs, the hours you can really bill - and returns the figure. It runs in the page, sends nothing anywhere, and takes two minutes.
If that figure surprises you, fix the pricing before you fix the software. No tracker repairs a rate that was never going to work.
- Write your three requirements on paper before you open any shop page.
- Give any tracker one week. If you avoid it on a busy Tuesday, the tracker is the problem, not your discipline.
- Never buy two tools that hold the same facts. One of them will become a lie you do not know about.
The free tool for this
What an hour has to cost to pay you - What an hour has to cost to pay you. It runs in the page, asks for your own numbers, and sends nothing anywhere.
If you would rather not build it yourself
ClientOS keeps quotes, jobs, invoices, payments and expenses on one sheet, with ageing and days past due worked out for you, and it opens in any spreadsheet program without an account. ClientOS is $19. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.
Questions people actually ask
Is a spreadsheet really enough?
For most freelancers with fewer than about ten open jobs, yes. The test is whether your sheet shows the oldest unpaid invoice without scrolling or doing arithmetic. If it does, keep it and spend the money elsewhere.
What about a tracker with a monthly fee?
Only if the fee buys something you use every week, usually invoicing or automatic reminders. Paying monthly for a list you could keep in a sheet is a subscription you will cancel in six months and then forget about.
Read next
How to keep track of unpaid invoices without a system you hate, How to write a late payment reminder that actually gets paid, The client onboarding checklist that prevents every later argument, The one-page weekly review for a one-person business, What every invoice line item should say (and what never to write).