TopTracker

Billing by the hour requires a record somebody else will accept, and the awkward part of freelancing is that the client cannot see you working. TopTracker addresses that by timing the work and, if you allow it, capturing evidence that it happened.

The TopTracker timing side is conventional. A timer runs against a project and a task, entries can be added or corrected by hand, and the result becomes a timesheet the client can look at.

The evidence side is where it gets interesting, and where the design decision that matters actually sits.

The monitoring is optional and you choose

TopTracker offers screenshots at intervals, webcam captures, activity level measurement, all available, and all of them are switched on or off by the person being tracked rather than by whoever is paying.

That inversion is unusual and worth understanding, because it changes what the software is. An employer monitoring tool imposes surveillance from above. This puts the settings in the hands of the freelancer, who decides how much to disclose and can turn any of it off.

The practical reality is more complicated than the design. A client who wants screenshots will ask for screenshots, and a freelancer who declines is making a negotiating decision rather than a technical one. The control is real and it does not remove the conversation.

Where the concern runs the other way, meaning software capturing your screen without permission, a tool that blocks the ordinary screen capture route addresses that different problem.

Activity level is a poor measure and worth understanding

This deserves saying plainly, because it is the TopTracker feature most likely to misrepresent you.

Activity level counts keyboard and mouse input over a period and reports it as a percentage. High numbers look industrious and low numbers look idle.

The trouble is what produces low numbers. Reading documentation, thinking about an approach, sketching on paper, talking to the client on the phone, watching a build complete, all register as almost nothing while being exactly the work you are being paid for.

The inverse also holds. Mechanical, repetitive typing scores highly while producing little of value, so the measure rewards the wrong behaviour in both directions.

If a client is judging you on that figure, the useful response is a conversation about what the number does and does not capture, before the misunderstanding becomes an invoice dispute.

Screenshots as a record rather than a leash

The TopTracker screenshot capability has a legitimate use that gets lost in the surveillance framing.

For a freelancer, periodic captures are a defence rather than an intrusion. A client questioning whether nine hours were spent on their project can be shown what was on screen during those hours, which settles the question in a way that assertion cannot.

Blur options exist for anybody working with material that should not appear in a client’s report, which matters when the same machine holds work for other clients.

The captures are stored remotely rather than on your machine, so they exist somewhere other than where you control, and that deserves deciding about before enabling the feature rather than afterwards.

Reports, invoices, getting paid

TopTracker exports timesheets and reports summarise by project, task, period, which is the part that turns tracked hours into something billable.

Invoicing and payment handling are included, which removes a step for anybody currently timing in one place and invoicing in another.

That integration is the main argument over a plain timer, and it also ties you to one arrangement. For time tracking alone, without the monitoring and without the payment side, Clockify covers that ground and works across teams of any size.

Where it fits

The TopTracker audience is the remote freelancer billing hourly to clients who cannot observe the work, particularly where a degree of trust still has to be established.

For anybody working on fixed-price deliverables, none of this applies. Nobody cares how long a fixed-price job took, and tracking it produces information that serves no purpose while creating a record that could work against you.

For a salaried employee, this is the wrong category entirely, since employer monitoring tools are a different product with a different power arrangement.

Keeping the client conversation somewhere other than the tracker is sensible regardless, and Slack is where most of that ends up happening.

Conclusion

TopTracker gets one thing right that most of this category gets wrong, which is putting the monitoring settings in the hands of the person being monitored. Combined with timesheets, reports, invoicing in one place, that makes it a reasonable choice for an hourly freelancer establishing trust with a new client.

Treat the activity percentage with suspicion and explain it early. It measures typing rather than working, and the gap between those two is where every argument about a timesheet actually begins. And if you bill fixed prices, skip the whole category, because the hours are not the client’s business and a record of them helps nobody.