For firms where quiet matters
Client numbers stay on your drive. Not someone else's cloud.
Hours live in one file, on your machine. Nothing leaves. Track the busy season without the cloud conversation, bill fixed-fee or hourly from the same data, and hand the working papers a clean CSV.
One payment. No rent. File is yours.
Accounting & Finance — straight talk
The parts that usually go sideways.
Busy season looks fine, until someone quits
Weekly totals per person, per job, on the timesheet grid. You spot the overload on a Tuesday in March, not in the exit interview in May. Set a daily goal in hours and each person sees their own bar.
That $400 return cost you $900
Give each return type a standard hours budget. When corp returns keep crossing 90% and individuals do not, you know which fee to lift next year. The math is hours, so it stays honest.
Compliance hates your SaaS stack
One SQLite file in your Documents folder. No accounts, no telemetry, no call home. Auto-backup runs on launch and every 6 hours of use, with rolling local copies, and you can mirror to your own R2 or S3 bucket on every save. Back it up where policy says.
Fixed-fee and hourly live in two places
They do not have to. Log hours the same way for both, then invoice hourly lines for one client and a fixed-fee line for the next. The entries stay as your proof either way.
What you’ll actually use
Just the bits you bill for.
Budgets per job type
Individual, corp, bookkeeping. Each gets a standard hours budget with 75/90/100% alerts. Outliers pop right away, while there is still time to staff them.
Filings and fees, on the bill
Registry fee, courier, research. Log as expense with a photo of the receipt, flag billable, and it lands on the client's invoice as its own line.
Exports your reviewer likes
Any range, any cut, to CSV. Drops straight into the workpaper without a pivot. Entries carry notes and tags, so review questions answer themselves.
Quiet by design
Offline first. Your data never touches our servers because there are no servers. The license checks in once at activation, then never again.
And the rest of owntime
Timers, timesheets, invoices with tax, expenses with snaps, estimates, per-client currency, CSV you can hand to anyone — the full list.
Set it up like this
Your world, in your trade’s words.
First run: pick Accounting & finance
Engagements instead of projects, Close step for tasks, a period hint in the tag field (2026-09). owntime seeds Reconcile, Journals, Payroll, Review and tints the app green.
Client = the client
One record per client or family group, with their currency. Everything rolls up here.
Project = the engagement
2025 individual return, Q1 books, audit. Each gets a rate and an hours budget that matches how you priced it.
Tasks = the work kind
Reconcile, journals, payroll, review. owntime seeds these four, and the same set across jobs keeps reporting clean year to year.
Estimates = the fee letter
Write the fee line by line. When they say yes, convert it to an invoice without retyping.
A week in owntime
How the work actually flows.
January: set the budgets
Clone last year's engagements, set this year's hours budgets from what last year actually took. The numbers are in the CSV if you need them.
Busy season: log as you go
Timer or manual entries, notes autocompleted from history. Daily goal bars keep everyone honest without a status meeting.
Weekly: read the grid
Friday, open the timesheet. Anyone over pace gets help Monday morning. This is the whole trick to surviving April.
Billing: fee or hourly, same flow
Pick unbilled entries, add filing expenses, add a fixed-fee line where the deal is flat. Send the PDF, mark paid, move on.
What the client sees
A bill that looks like you wrote it.
| Description | Qty | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual return — standard | 3.5h | $180 | $630 |
| Quarterly bookkeeping — fixed fee | — | — | $450 |
| Expense: Registry filing | — | — | $85 |
| Total | $85 | ||
Plain lines, your letterhead, your numbers. PDF, made locally. No server in the middle.
Straight talk
What it will not do.
Every tool has edges. Here are ours, plainly, so you find out now and not in month three.
- ×Budgets count hours only — there is no money-based budget. A cost-vs-revenue margin report exists for your own eyes (internal, local, never printed on an invoice), but fee lift decisions start from hours.
- ×No e-sign, no portal, no client login. The invoice is a PDF you send. Clients never touch the app.
- ×Single file, single machine at a time. Use the sync folder mirror for a second machine, but two people should not write to the same file at once.
Asked a lot
Questions accounting & finance people ask.
Where exactly does the data live?
In one SQLite file on your machine, readable with any SQLite tool. Backups run on launch and every 6 hours of use, and you can mirror every save to your own R2 or S3 bucket.
Can we bill fixed fees and still track hours?
Yes, and you should. Log hours normally for your own costing, then put a fixed-fee line on the invoice. The hours stay as your record of what the fee really cost.
How do disbursements work?
Log the filing fee or courier as a billable expense with a receipt photo. It waits on that client's next invoice and prints as its own line.
What about multi-currency clients?
Set currency per client. Each invoice prints in that client's money at the rate you set.
Test it on a real week.
14 days, full app. If it doesn’t survive your busy week, don’t pay. Simple.
Other worlds: