"Time Tracking for Design Teams, by Revision"

Round one is in the proposal

. Round two is in the proposal. Round three is where the margin goes, because the client had notes, and the notes had notes, and nobody counted the rounds until the job was done and the fee was already spent.

This post is for design studios and creative teams that bill in revisions and are tired of pretending a flat project budget captures how design work actually runs. If your work moves in rounds, and the conversation about scope always starts with "this is round four," this is written for you.

#The revision problem

Design work is not linear. A brand identity job is not "fifty hours, done." It is concept, feedback, refinement, feedback, refinement, feedback, final. Each round takes time. Each round is billable or not, depending on what the proposal said and whether the client remembers what the proposal said.

Most trackers treat this as one project with one budget. The budget fills, the alerts fire, and you discover the overrun at the end, when the fee is already spent and the conversation with the client is already awkward.

The fix is to make the revision visible while it is happening, not after.

#Tag the rounds

owntime lets you tag entries with free text. For a design studio, the tags are the rounds. r1, r2, r3. Or concept, refine, final. Or whatever your team already calls them. Tag the entries as you go, and you can filter by round and see exactly how many hours each one took.

This is not a special design mode. It is the standard tag feature, used for the thing design teams actually care about. The value is not the tag. The value is being able to tell a client, with a number on the page, that round four cost twelve hours, and the proposal included two rounds of revisions.

That conversation is different when it starts with data. "Round four cost twelve hours" is a fact. "We have been doing a lot of revisions" is a feeling. Facts end scope arguments faster.

#Day rates without a hack

Design studios often bill day rates. A day is a day, whether it is eight hours of focused work or six hours and two hours of meetings. Most trackers want you to log exact hours and multiply by an hourly rate, which is not how day rates work.

owntime handles this by letting you log a day as one line. Eight hours, one project, day rate applied. Or break the hour entries into an invoice line that totals a day. The invoice builder groups by project or by day, so you can present the invoice the way the client expects: three days at your day rate, not twenty-four hours at an hourly rate that makes the math look bigger than it is.

#Studio budgets that stay honest

A studio has deliverables, not just projects. A brand identity. A guidelines deck. A website. Each deliverable has a budget, and the studio has a total capacity, and the two numbers have to reconcile or someone is working weekends.

In owntime, each deliverable is a project with a hours budget. The alerts at 75, 90, and 100 percent fire per deliverable. A studio lead can see, at a glance, which deliverables are on track and which ones are burning, without running a report or opening a dashboard.

I will be honest about what this is not. This is not a resource scheduler. It does not tell you who is free next week. It does not allocate people to deliverables. It tells you, for each deliverable, whether the hours are on budget. If your studio needs the full resourcing layer, that is a different tool. This is the time-and-budget layer, and it is the layer most studios can actually use on a Friday at 5pm.

#The honest limits

owntime does not do live multi-person editing. Each designer keeps their own file. A six-person studio has six files. If your studio needs a shared live view of who is working on what, that requires a server, and that is the trade this product avoids.

It also does not do proofing, annotation, or client approval workflows. The invoice goes out, and the client responds in email, and the revision conversation happens the way it always has. The tracker just makes the round count visible.

If your studio is small, if the revision conversation is the part that hurts, and if you want to own your own time data, this is worth a trial. If you need the full studio management stack, this is a piece of it.

Try owntime free for 14 days · See pricing, one time

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