In This Guide
Why agencies track time at all
There are three reasons, and they are not equally good.
To bill hourly. The obvious one, and the least interesting, because fewer agencies bill purely by the hour every year.
To watch people. This is the reason that poisons adoption. Teams can tell the difference between measurement and surveillance, and they respond to the second by making the numbers meaningless.
To know which clients make money. This is the reason worth the effort. A $3,000 retainer that takes forty hours a month is a different business from one that takes eight, and without tracking they look identical on the invoice.
The number that changes decisions
Fee divided by hours, per client, per month. Agencies that see this for the first time usually find at least one client they should reprice or let go.
What separates useful from tedious
The timer must be where the work is. If starting a timer means opening a second app, it will not happen. It belongs on the task.
Time has to attach to a client, not just a project. Otherwise you can report on projects and still not know which client is unprofitable.
It has to connect to billing. Hours that need re-typing into an invoice get re-typed wrongly, or not at all.
Someone has to be able to fix an entry. People forget to stop timers. A tool that makes correcting that hard collects fiction.
Getting a team to actually use it
Adoption is the whole problem. Three things help.
Say what it is for, out loud. If the team believes it is surveillance they will round everything to the nearest hour. If they believe it is for pricing work properly, they will be accurate, because accurate helps them.
Make starting it one click from the task. Every extra step is a reason not to.
Never use it to compare people. Once it has been used that way, the data is finished.
What it costs
Dedicated time trackers usually charge per user, from around $5 to $12 each per month. For a team of eight that is $40 to $96 a month for tracking alone, and the data still has to reach whatever you invoice from.
All-in-one agency tools include tracking in a plan, which is generally cheaper and removes the export step. AgencyKit includes it from $9 a month per account whatever the team size.
How AgencyKit does it
In AgencyKit the timer lives on the task. Start it and it runs, stop it and the entry is written to the timesheet against that task, that project and that client automatically. Moving a task to complete stops the timer rather than leaving it running overnight.
Because the same workspace holds the invoices and the salaries, the reports can do the part that matters: cost of delivery against fee, per client, per month. That is where an over-serviced retainer becomes visible.
Billing is per account, so tracking does not get more expensive as the team grows.
Key Takeaways
- The reason worth tracking for is knowing which clients are profitable
- Using timesheets to compare people destroys the accuracy of the data
- The timer has to sit on the task or it will not get started
- Time must attach to a client, not only a project, to answer the profit question
- Per-user trackers cost $5 to $12 each, all-in-one tools include it in the plan
Frequently Asked Questions
It is a tool that records how long work takes and attaches those hours to a task, a project and a client. Agencies use it to bill hourly work accurately and, more importantly, to compare the hours a client consumes against the fee they pay, which is the only reliable way to tell which clients are profitable.
Because the fee is fixed and the effort is not. Two clients paying the same retainer can consume very different amounts of work, and on the invoice they look identical. Tracking is what turns that into a number, and the number is what tells you which retainer to reprice at renewal and which one to keep.
Often, and usually for a good reason: they suspect it is about monitoring them rather than pricing the work. The way through is to say plainly what it is for, keep starting a timer to one click on the task, and never use the data to compare individuals. Used for comparison once, the numbers stop being honest.
A timer that lives on the task rather than in a separate app, time that attaches to the client and not only the project, a connection to invoicing so hours do not get re-typed, and an easy way to correct a forgotten timer. Beyond that, the report that matters is cost of delivery against fee, per client.
Dedicated trackers typically charge per user, around $5 to $12 each per month, so a team of eight pays $40 to $96 for tracking alone. All-in-one agency platforms include tracking in the plan price, which is usually cheaper and avoids exporting data into whatever raises the invoices. AgencyKit includes it from $9 a month per account.
In an all-in-one, yes: hours logged against a task can be pulled onto an invoice without anyone copying them. This matters more than it sounds, because manual transfer is where billable hours quietly disappear. In separate tools you are usually exporting a CSV and trusting somebody to do it every month.
References
- AgencyKit client portal, contracts and invoicing (2026). agencykit.tech
- AgencyKit pricing, billed per account (2026). agencykit.tech
- AgencyKit time tracking and timesheets (2026). agencykit.tech