From Time Log to Invoice: A Freelancer's Guide to Super Productivity

If you are a freelancer, time literally is money. Yet, most freelancers suffer from the “Leaky Bucket” problem: the 5-minute email reply, the 10-minute “quick fix” on a deployed site, or the unplanned client call that runs long.

These micro-tasks often go untracked. By the end of the month, you might have worked 40 hours but only billed for 35. Over a year, that’s thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Super Productivity offers a robust, free, and privacy-first solution to plug these leaks. This guide explores how to set up a workflow that captures every billable minute – from the initial time log to the final invoice – ensuring you are compensated for the value you deliver. See our Time Tracking & Work Analytics Hub for more strategic advice.

1. Setup: Managing Multiple Clients

The first challenge freelancers face is keeping client work separate. You don’t want to accidentally bill Client A for Client B’s bug fix. A sloppy setup leads to billing disputes and lost trust.

Strategy A: Projects (Recommended)

Use Projects for distinct clients.

1. Create a Project for “Client Acme”.
2. Create a Project for “Client Beta”.
3. Inside each project, you can further organize by adding specific tasks or importing them from the client’s Jira/GitHub (if they give you access).

This method provides the cleanest separation. Each project has its own settings, so if “Client Acme” requires Jira integration and “Client Beta” uses GitHub, you can configure them independently without conflict.

Strategy B: Tags (For Retainers)

If you work on a retainer basis or have many small clients where context switching is frequent, Tags might work better.

1. Create a global tag for #AcmeCorp and #BetaLLC.
2. Tag every task accordingly.
3. This allows you to see a “Day View” of all your work mixed together, while still being able to filter by tag for reporting later.

What About Retainers and Flat Fees?

Even if you don’t bill by the hour, tracking time is invaluable. It helps you understand your true hourly rate, identify scope creep, and ensure project profitability. By consistently logging time, you build data that informs future pricing and protects your margins.

2. The Workflow: Capture Every Minute

The goal is to make tracking frictionless so you actually do it. If tracking feels like a chore, you will skip it, and the bucket starts leaking again.

The “Start/Stop” Habit

Super Productivity can be configured to sit in your system tray for quick access. When a client calls, use the global shortcut to bring up Super Productivity, add a task like ‘Call with John’, and start the timer with a couple of keystrokes. You don’t need to open a web app or log in. It’s instantaneous.

Making this a reflex is key. The simpler the tool, the faster the habit forms.

The “Idle Time” Safety Net

We all forget to stop the timer when we walk away to grab coffee or take a break. This is the number one cause of “billing anxiety”–that fear that you are accidentally overcharging a client.

• Feature: Super Productivity detects when your mouse/keyboard has been idle for a set period (e.g., 5 minutes).
• The Prompt: When you return, it asks: “You were idle for 15 minutes. Do you want to discard this time, keep it, or split it?”
• The Benefit: You never accidentally bill a client for your lunch break, and you keep your records pristine without obsessive monitoring.

3. The Psychology of Billing: Overcoming Guilt

Many freelancers struggle with “under-billing” due to impostor syndrome. You might think, “It only took me 5 minutes to fix that CSS bug, I shouldn’t charge for it.”

But that 5-minute fix required 5 years of experience to execute quickly.

Super Productivity helps you overcome this by providing objective data. When you see “0.25h” logged for a task, it validates that work was done. It removes the emotion from the equation.

Advanced Tactics: Rounding Rules

While Super Productivity tracks time with sub-minute precision, you can use the export data to apply these business rules in your invoicing software. Being consistent with your tracking allows you to be confident in your billing policies.

4. Getting Paid: Exporting Your Data

At the end of the month, you need to turn those logs into an invoice. Super Productivity has a powerful “Worklog” feature.

1. Go to Worklog.
2. Select your Date Range (e.g., “Last Month”).
3. Filter by Project (e.g., “Client Acme”).
4. Review the entries. You can edit descriptions here to make them more “client-friendly” (e.g., changing “fixed stupid bug” to “Resolved critical UI regression”).

A typical monthly workflow might look like this:

• Week 1-3: Track time daily using the “Start/Stop” habit.
• Last Business Day of Month: Go to Worklog, select client project, review, export.
• Next Morning: Send invoice based on accurate reports.

The Export

Click the Export button. You can choose:

• CSV: Perfect for importing into Excel or Sheets to format a manual invoice.
• JSON: Great if you have a script that auto-generates PDF invoices.
• Copy to Clipboard: For quickly pasting a summary into an email.

You can even customize the columns included in the export, ensuring you share exactly what the client needs to see – no more, no less.

5. Why Local-First Matters for NDAs

Many time-tracking tools (like Toggl or Harvest) are cloud-based SaaS. This means your data – including sensitive task names, client project details, and proprietary descriptions – lives on their servers.

For freelancers working under strict Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), this can be a compliance grey area. If a client asks, “Where is my project data stored?”, saying “On a third-party server I don’t control” might be a violation. Cloud tools can be NDA-compliant, but they introduce dependencies and data exposure paths that many clients prefer to avoid.

Super Productivity is Local-First.

• Your data is stored in a JSON file on your hard drive.
• It is never sent to a server unless you configure sync to your own storage (for example a Dropbox/Drive-synced folder or a WebDAV server).
• You have 100% ownership of your business intelligence.

Data Sovereignty & Backups

Because the data is yours, you are responsible for it. We recommend setting up an automatic backup of your Super Productivity data file to a secure location (like an encrypted drive or a private cloud storage). This ensures that even if your laptop breaks, your billing records are safe. On Linux, macOS, and Windows, you can find your data directory under Settings → Data & Sync → Open Data Folder. For more comprehensive setup and sync advice, consult Super Productivity Handbook – Setup, Data Management & Advanced Configuration.

Conclusion

You don’t need a monthly subscription to track your time professionally. By combining discipline with the right tool, you can ensure every minute of value you provide is captured, categorized, and compensated.