Hourbook

Most freelancers track hours in one place, tasks in another, invoices in a third and client files scattered across Drive or OneDrive. Nothing joins up, retainer clients are a black box and writing a monthly report takes an evening you could bill.

Hourbook is the app I built for my own freelance work — a hotel on a weekly flat fee, a studio billed by the hour — because I couldn't find anything that handled both without the overhead of tools built for teams or accountants.

Clock and timesheet

One tap to clock in, to a client, project or task. Switch what you're working on without stopping the clock. Add forgotten time by hand: "1:30", "1.5" or "90m". Billable and non-billable time, a monthly timesheet with filters and CSV export.

Flat-fee and retainer tracking

This is the part I couldn't find anywhere else. Charge a client a flat weekly or monthly fee, and Hourbook still tracks your hours against what you agreed — "8.6h of 10h this week" — shows your recent average and tells you what the fee actually works out to per hour. Invoice the fee as a single line with one tap, without showing the client your hours.

Projects, jobs and tasks

Three kinds of work kept separate on the board: one-off jobs with a deadline and optional hours budget, ongoing retainer work with agreed hours per week or month, and quick ad-hoc tasks added in seconds. Table or Kanban board, statuses, priorities, due dates and clock-in-to-this-task from the board.

Invoices

Build an invoice from unbilled hours for any client and date range — as itemised lines or grouped by project. Per-client invoice numbering with your own prefix and sequence, or one business-wide counter. VAT, payment terms, due dates, overdue flags, and a clean branded PDF.

Client reports that write themselves

Three templates — job report, monthly report and site visit — that fill themselves in from your logged hours, task list and time notes. You edit, choose whether to show hours and download a PDF to send the client. Reports are saved against each client.

Built for UK solo freelancers

Pounds, VAT, UK dates and plain British English. No team features, no seats, no workspaces to wade through. Works on phone, tablet and computer, stays in sync and backs up every night.

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Hourbook is in early access — not yet open to everyone. I'm looking for a small group of freelancers to try it, tell me what's missing and help shape the first public version.