---

Stop Losing Hours You’ll Never Get Back: How Time Tracking Software Helps Your Small Business

If you’re running a small business, chances are you already know what it feels like to end the week exhausted, still not quite sure where all the time went. You’ve been flat out, yet the to-do list barely moved and then on top of it all, you’ve got to work out how much time to bill different clients. Good news, the client work got done, but the marketing? The strategy? The things that would actually grow your business? Those got pushed to “next week” again.

You’re not imagining it. According to a 2024 study by Slack, small business owners lose an average of 96 minutes of productivity every single day, which amounts to more than three full working weeks lost every year. And yet the majority of small business owners don’t have a proper system in place to see where that time is actually going.

That’s where time tracking software comes in. Not as a way to micro-manage yourself or your team, but as a genuinely useful tool that shows you the truth about your working day, so you can manage it better and find more time for marketing, or better still more client work.

The Real Challenges of Tracking Time as a Small Business Owner

For service-based businesses, including consultants, freelancers, agencies, and solopreneurs, time genuinely is money. But tracking it accurately is harder than it sounds.

Forgetting to log the small stuff. That five-minute client call, the quick email reply, the minor revision you squeezed in at 8pm. Individually, they feel too small to bother recording. Collectively, they can add up to hours of unbilled work every week. Research consistently shows that relying on memory to reconstruct a working day leads to rounded, inaccurate entries, and leaves real money on the table.

Juggling multiple clients and projects at once. When you’re switching between clients throughout the day, it becomes genuinely difficult to remember how long you spent on what. Context switching doesn’t just cost you time; it costs you accuracy. Without a tool tracking in real time, your timesheets end up being educated guesses.

Managing team members’ time. If you have even one or two people working with you, keeping track of who’s spending time on what, and whether it’s billable or not, adds a whole new layer of complexity. Manual spreadsheets and end-of-week check-ins are a recipe for errors and awkward conversations.

Not knowing which clients or projects are actually profitable. You might have a client you love working with, but if you tracked every hour honestly, you’d realise you’re charging half what the work is worth. Without data, you’re making pricing decisions based on gut feeling rather than reality.

And while all of this is happening, the tasks that would genuinely grow your business, such as marketing, strategy, and business development, keep getting bumped. According to a study by Inc., business owners waste up to 21.8 hours a week on low-value tasks. That’s not laziness; that’s a system problem.

Businesses that track their time effectively can boost revenue by up to 61%

Affinity Live

What Good Time Tracking Actually Looks Like

The good news is that the solution doesn’t have to be complicated. Businesses that track their time effectively can boost revenue by up to 61% (according to Affinity Live) and the difference usually comes down to having a tool that makes it easy to do in the first place.

In practice, that means one-click timers rather than lengthy forms, mobile access rather than desktop only, instant reports rather than manual calculations, and ideally integrations with the tools you’re already using so it fits into your workflow rather than adding to it.

Toggl Track: Simple, Powerful Time Tracking for Small Businesses

Toggl Track is one of the most widely used and respected time tracking tools available, and it’s built with exactly this kind of business in mind. Trusted by teams at companies like Microsoft, KPMG, and BCG, it works equally well for a one-person consultancy as it does for a growing agency.

The core appeal of Toggl Track is its simplicity. Starting a timer takes one click. Stopping it takes one click. There’s no complex setup, no steep learning curve, and no reason to put off logging your time until “later”, which, as we all know, usually means never.

Simple doesn’t mean limited, though. Toggl Track has a solid set of features built specifically around the needs of service-based businesses.

Project profitability tracking. See in real time how much time is being spent on each client or project, and compare that against your billable rate and labour costs. You’ll quickly be able to see which clients are worth their weight and which are costing you more than they’re paying you.

Historical data and better project scoping. Instead of estimating how long a project will take based on instinct, Toggl Track lets you look back at similar past work and quote with confidence. This helps you price more accurately, avoid scope creep, and protect your margins.

Team dashboards. If you manage a small team, you can get a clear overview of where everyone’s time is going, who’s stretched too thin, who has capacity, and whether time is being allocated to the right clients. No chasing people for updates.

Billable and non-billable hour tracking. Toggl Track makes it easy to separate the time you can charge for from the time you can’t, including admin, internal meetings, and business development. Seeing these figures side by side is often a genuine revelation.

100+ integrations. Toggl Track works alongside the tools you’re already using, including project management apps and calendar tools. You can embed a timer directly into your existing apps via browser extensions, so tracking becomes part of your natural workflow rather than an extra step on top of it.

Multiple ways to track. Whether you prefer a web app, a desktop app, a mobile app, or even a physical stopwatch, Toggl Track accommodates you. You can also connect your calendar and copy events directly as time entries, which is a practical time-saver in itself.

Timesheet reports. Generate clear, accurate reports that are ready to share with clients or use for invoicing, without having to manually tally anything up.

The free plan is available for unlimited users, making it an accessible starting point for small businesses who want to get a handle on their time without committing to a monthly cost straight away.

Creating Space for the Things That Actually Matter

Time tracking isn’t just about billing clients correctly, though that’s certainly a benefit worth having. It’s also about understanding where your working week is actually going, so you can start to redirect your effort towards the work that genuinely moves your business forward.

Marketing is a perfect example. It’s consistently one of the first things that gets dropped when a business owner feels overwhelmed. It can feel like a luxury when you’re up to your ears in client work. But without consistent, intentional marketing, growth stalls. New clients don’t materialise. You stay stuck on the same treadmill.

When you have a clear picture of where your time is going, you can make deliberate choices about how to spend it. Time for a weekly email to your list. Time for a social media post that actually reaches new people. Time to plan, to think, to build something that lasts.

Toggl Track won’t do your marketing for you. But it will help you stop wondering where the day went, and give you a much clearer view of where it could go instead.

Try Toggl Track for free and see what a few weeks of honest time tracking can do for your business.

---

This post contains affiliate links. If you sign up to Toggl Track via our link, we may earn a small commissihttps://get.toggl.com/ym7ygud9zplron at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we genuinely believe in.