Ask HN: What are good self hosted time tracking software for consultants?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
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  • Kimai 2

    Discontinued Kimai is a web-based multi-user time-tracking application. Works great for everyone: freelancers, companies, organizations - everyone can track their times, generate reports, create invoices and do so much more. SaaS version available at https://www.kimai.cloud [Moved to: https://github.com/kimai/kimai]

  • I’ve been using Kimai [1] for a bit over a year to track my freelancing work for various clients as well as the work I do for my own projects. I can definitely recommend it!

    It's easy to install and very pleasant to use for tracking time.

    Entries have an "exported" flag to mark if you've already billed for a certain hour or not. You could also generate invoices directly from Kimai but I'm not using that feature because I'm creating my invoices in another program.

    [1] https://www.kimai.org

  • Invoice Ninja

    Invoices, Expenses and Tasks built with Laravel, Flutter and React

  • I went back and forth between a couple of them -- Kimai2 and InvoiceNinja, back when Ninja was still on v4. Ultimately, every time tracking system does things a little differently, and after switching back and forth again, I've settled back on InvoiceNinja v5 (https://invoiceninja.com/).

    If all you need is time tracking, Kimai2 and several others will do the job just fine. But I've found in mine line of work that it's useful to be able to produce formal quotes and invoices for tracking purposes. Ninja lets you do all of that, no extensions or modules required, and all of the components are integrated with each other (quotes can be converted to invoices, projects, or both, invoicing can be done by task or by project, expenses can be included in invoices, etc.) and it also features a very nice automated emailing system for client invoice/quote notifications and even a guest frontend for them to log into.

    So all in all, I've found InvoiceNinja to be extremely useful and can't recommend it enough.

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

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  • awesome-selfhosted

    A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own servers

  • > Or is there a list of them somewhere?

    awesome-selfhosted lists 4 self-hosted systems: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#tim...

  • Watson

    :watch: A wonderful CLI to track your time!

  • I like Watson https://github.com/TailorDev/Watson and it used to have a web backend (crick) but that seems to be abandoned.

  • nix-configs

    Repository containing my personal Nix (NixOS, Home Manager etc.) configurations (by nazarewk-iac)

  • I'm very happy with https://klog.jotaen.net/ it has extremely simple text format editable from anywhere and a command converting those to JSON (sadly not the other way around).

    I've written a Python script to ease my everyday (and monthly) interactions with it like excel report for my employer https://github.com/nazarewk-iac/nix-configs/blob/main/packag...

  • punched

    Keep track of the spent time on your projects via the command line

  • I wrote a small ruby cli tool, which I use since over 5 years for all my freelance and consulting jobs:

    https://github.com/pstaender/punched

    To let it sync with other computers I let it store the files in nextcoloud (they are only plain text files). There is just basic functionality, but you can also set different hour rates per project and let it show the total sum of hours for a project.

  • nonota

    No Nonsense Tasking - CLI tool to track tasks along with timing information

  • My own nonota: https://github.com/matheusd/nonota

    CLI TUI, just a list of tasks, track time across them or manually add the time. Backing is a yaml file, so you can adjust if needed.

    Runs anywhere you can use Go to compile to.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • timed-backend

    Django API for the Timed application

  • timed-frontend

    Ember.js UI for the Timed application

  • taskdb

    Personal task management solution

  • logseq

    A local-first, non-linear, outliner notebook for organizing and sharing your personal knowledge base. Use it to organize your todo list, to write your journals, or to record your unique life.

  • Logseq does some basic time tracking and if used correctly, a second brain. https://logseq.com/

  • whatdid

    What did I do all day?

  • I don't know if shameless plugs are allowed here (sorry if not!), but I have an open source project for Mac that's aimed at exactly this problem. Every ~10 minutes (configurable), it pops up an unobtrusive prompt to ask you what you're working on right now. It then has some basic reporting and aggregating functionality. It's not specifically targeted for consulting / invoicing (I made it because I often ended my day wondering what the heck I'd done all day), and it's sometimes a tad rough around the edges, but it could help. https://whatdid.yuvalshavit.com / https://github.com/yshavit/whatdid

    (I'm newish to HN, so please let me know if this message is inappropriate!)

  • org-journal

    A simple org-mode based journaling mode

  • timetrap

    Simple command line timetracker

  • I have used TimeTrap (https://github.com/samg/timetrap) for years. I have it installed on a dev/utility server I have hosted in the cloud. I use JuiceSSH on my android phone to run quick check in and check out scripts. While I'm at my workstation I have a terminal open that is SSHed into my VM. One of the panels in tmux is using a watch command to monitor my time. Purely just a time tracking function so I can't generate invoices or anything like that.

  • Titra

    titra - modern open source project time tracking for freelancers and small teams

  • whid

    What Have I Done - Time Tracker for Freelancers and Individual Contractors (by jgaa)

  • I wrote whid for my personal needs, and have used it for more than 20 years ;)

    https://github.com/jgaa/whid

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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