"A Team of Six People, Six Separate Files. Here Is Why."

#The question behind the question

I get the same email every few days. It usually starts with "this looks great for me, but..." and ends with some version of "how does it work for my team?"

The team in question is almost always between two and eight people. A small agency. A design studio. A consultancy. The kind of shop where everyone bills clients for time and someone, usually the owner, needs to see the total picture at the end of the week.

The real question under the question is: can I see everyone's hours in one place, the way I could with Harvest or Toggl?

The honest answer is no. Not the way you are used to. And I want to explain why without pretending the trade does not exist, because it does, and you should know it before you buy.

#What owntime actually does for a team

Here is the mechanism, stated plainly. Each person installs owntime on their own Mac. Each person tracks time in their own local file at ~/Documents/owntime/timesheet.db. A six-person studio has two licenses and six separate files

6-person studio, 3 years

There is no shared dashboard. There is no live view of who is tracking what. There is no admin console where the owner sees everyone's hours in real time. The files can be synced through a shared folder like Dropbox or Syncthing, and there are exports a studio can roll up into a combined view, but the product itself does not merge them for you.

I know that sounds like a step backward. For some studios, it is. I want to be straight about which ones.

#The studios for whom this is the wrong tool

If your studio runs on a shared, live timesheet, where a project manager looks at a dashboard and reallocates people in real time, owntime is not your tool. If you need Harvest Forecast-style resourcing, where you can see who is free on Tuesday and who is overbooked, you should stay with a hosted team tool. If your billing depends on a single combined view of everyone's hours that updates live, this product will frustrate you.

I am not going to talk you out of those needs. They are real. They are also the exact needs that require a server, and a server is the thing I am not building. The hosted team model and the live dashboard are not separate features you can toggle off. They are the same architecture. You cannot have one without the other, and I have chosen the side without.

#The studios for whom this is enough

Now the other kind of studio. The kind where each person bills their own clients, tracks their own hours, and the "team view" is really just the owner asking "did everyone bill their hours this week?" on a Friday afternoon.

For that studio, six separate files is not a limitation. It is closer to how the work actually happens. Each person owns their own time. Each person's history is their own. The owner does not need a live dashboard; they need to know that everyone invoiced, and they can get that from six exported reports or a quick Friday check-in.

This is the studio owntime is built for. Not because I could not imagine the other kind, but because the other kind requires a server, and a server requires a subscription, and a subscription is the thing that got us here.

#What I actually need from you

I want to be honest about what I am optimizing for, because I think it helps you decide.

owntime is optimized for the consultant or small agency where each person is a billing unit, not a resource to be allocated. If that is you, the per-person file model will feel normal within a week. If that is not you, I would rather you know now than discover it during a trial.

I get emails from both kinds of studios. The ones where per-person files fit write back and say "this is exactly what I wanted and I do not know why no one builds it this way." The ones where it does not fit write back and say "I need a shared dashboard, I am staying with Toggl." Both answers are correct. I am building for the first one.

#The honest middle ground

There is a middle that I want to acknowledge, because it is where a lot of real studios live.

You mostly bill your own clients, but once a month you need a combined view for a group project or a client report. owntime can do that through exports. Each person exports their hours for the period, and someone rolls them up. It is not automatic. It is not live. It is a monthly fifteen-minute task instead of a real-time dashboard.

For some studios, that trade is fine. The monthly rollup is enough, and they would rather own their data than have a live view. For other studios, the monthly rollup is not enough, and they need the dashboard. Both are reasonable. I am telling you which one I built.

#The bottom line

A team of six people, six separate files. That is the product. It is not a limitation I am waiting to fix. It is the architectural choice that makes everything else, the buy-once price, the local file, the offline work, the no-server privacy, actually hold together.

If your studio needs a shared live dashboard, I will tell you to use Toggl or Harvest, and I mean it. If your studio is six people who each bill their own clients and just need to own their own time, this is built for you.

Try owntime free for 14 days · See the honest comparison with Toggl · Read what we will not build