For the one-person bill
One biller. No seat minimum. Keep the file.
Most 'Harvest alternatives' want three seats or an enterprise plan. You are one person who tracks time with rounding and sends an invoice. owntime is that loop, on your Mac, paid once.
One payment. No rent. File is yours.
Sole Practitioners — straight talk
The parts that usually go sideways.
The alternative wants a team
No minimum seats. One license, your machines. The Harvest thread that asked for a sole-practitioner tool was looking at Clockify and HourCap because everything else started at three people.
Rounding is the whole job
Set the increment (quarter hour, 6 minutes, 15). Invoice hours match what you agreed with the client, not a raw stopwatch.
Time lives in one tool, the bill in another
Select the week's entries, get grouped lines, PDF with your terms and tax. No export to a second subscription to get paid.
The last tracker raised the rent
You pay once. The copy never checks in again after activation. History is a SQLite file in Documents, not a login they can reprice.
What you’ll actually use
Just the bits you bill for.
Built for one person who bills
Timer, manual entries, weekly grid. No kiosk, no PTO, no 'team workspace.' The product stops where your practice stops.
Invoice is in the box
Unbilled time plus expenses, tax, PDF. Retainers as reminders you send yourself. Nothing auto-sends.
Import and leave
Harvest, Toggl, Clockify CSV. Dry-run first. Re-import skips duplicates. Your exit is the same file you work in.
Quiet by design
No account. License activates once. Backups on disk. Optional mirror to your own bucket.
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 Sole practitioners
Engagements for projects, Prep, Call, Delivery seeded as tasks, brand orange accent. Rounding stays wherever you set it (quarter hour by default).
Client = the client
One record, their currency, their address for the letterhead.
Project = the engagement
The matter, the brief, the retainer block. Hours budget if you quoted one.
Tasks = optional
Prep, call, delivery. Skip them if a project is enough.
Rounding = your rule
Set it once in Settings. Every invoice line uses it.
A week in owntime
How the work actually flows.
During the work
Timer or end-of-day hours. Notes autocomplete. Idle asks once, not a quiz.
Friday
Weekly grid. Fix anything thin while the week is warm.
Invoice day
Select unbilled, add expenses, check the lines, PDF, send.
If Harvest still has history
Export CSV, drop it on Import. Then you are done with their login.
What the client sees
A bill that looks like you wrote it.
| Description | Qty | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advisory — March (8 entries) | 12.5h | $180 | $2,250 |
| Calls and follow-up | 2h | $180 | $360 |
| Expense: Filing fee | — | — | $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.
- ×No Xero or QuickBooks sync. The invoice is a PDF you send. If the whole job is 'push hours into Xero,' this is the wrong tool.
- ×No phone app. Desk work only, plus the global hotkey on the Mac.
- ×One file, one person writing at a time. You are the whole team.
Asked a lot
Questions sole practitioners people ask.
I am one person. Do I pay per seat?
One license, and it covers up to three people. There is no minimum and no per-seat bill.
Can I round to 6 minutes or quarter hours?
Yes. Settings, round-to minutes. 0 means quarter hour. Invoice math uses that increment.
I invoice in Xero today.
You can still send a PDF from owntime, or use owntime for time and keep Xero for the tax return. There is no live sync.
What if I leave later?
Copy timesheet.db. Open it with any SQLite tool. Nothing is held on our side because there is no our side.
Test it on a real week.
14 days, full app. If it doesn’t survive your busy week, don’t pay. Simple.
Other worlds: