Do I need to track time if I charge fixed fees?

Not for the invoice itself, but it still tells you whether the project was profitable. A client can be set to a fixed fee in Tidst, and the hours you log against it are divided into the agreed amount to show what the work actually paid per hour.

How often should I review my time?

Often enough that the work still makes sense when you look at it. For some that is daily; for others a few times a week is enough.

Should every time entry appear on the invoice?

No. Your internal record can be more detailed than what you present to the client. Entries can be merged into a single line, renamed, or left off the invoice entirely.

What if I forgot to record something?

Add it manually while you still have enough context to make a reasonable entry. Completed tasks and calendar events can help you reconstruct missing work, but no system can guarantee that every piece of work left a trace.

Can Tidst use completed Todoist tasks as part of this workflow?

Yes. Completed tasks from connected Todoist projects can appear in The Queue for review before they become logged time.

Relevant meetings from connected Google Calendar and Outlook calendars can also appear as items to review, carrying their scheduled duration.

Does Tidst create invoices?

No, and that is deliberate. Tidst prepares what goes on the invoice — the billable work for a client and period, grouped, priced and reviewed — and you issue it in whatever you already invoice with. Structured e-invoicing is becoming mandatory for business-to-business invoices across much of the EU between 2026 and 2028, and a PDF generator bolted onto a time tracker cannot keep up with that. Your invoicing system can.

Does Tidst know whether an invoice was paid?

No. Tidst never sees the invoice, so it cannot see the payment either — that lives in the system that issued it. What Tidst can tell you, and your invoicing system cannot, is how much billable work is on the books that has not been sent anywhere yet.

Yes. Everything currently available in Tidst is free to use.

From time tracking to invoice

The awkward part of freelance invoicing is often not making the invoice. It is working out what should be on it.

A month of client work may be spread across tasks, meetings, small fixes, calls and longer work sessions. If the time record is incomplete, invoice day turns into a reconstruction exercise.

A better workflow is to keep the path from work to logged time as short as possible, then use that record when the invoice needs to be made.

The gap between doing the work and billing for it

Most lost detail happens before the invoice is created. You finish something and move on. A meeting ends and another task starts. A client asks for a small change that takes longer than expected.

None of this is difficult to invoice if it has already been recorded. The problem starts when the invoice is the first moment you try to remember the month.

At that point, you are not invoicing. You are doing archaeology.

Five steps from work to invoice

Step 1

Leave yourself something to work from

A useful time record starts with evidence that the work happened. That might be:

a completed task
a calendar meeting
a timer session
a manual entry

The exact method matters less than having something reliable enough to review later. Tidst is built around this idea: supported work signals give you a starting point instead of an empty timesheet.

Step 2

Turn the work into logged time

A completed task does not tell you how long it took. A meeting already has a scheduled duration. A timer session may be precise enough already. A manual entry may be the only sensible option for something unexpected.

The important part is reviewing the work while the context is still reasonably fresh. That is much easier than reconstructing an entire month at once.

A record is most useful when it is clear who the work belonged to. At minimum it should let you understand:

the client, and the project if that matters to you
what the work was
the date and the duration
whether the time is billable

Step 3

Review before invoice day

You do not need to obsess over the timesheet every hour. A short review once a day, or a few times a week, is enough to catch:

work with missing durations
entries assigned to the wrong client
work that should not be billed
work that happened but never made it into the record

It is usually easier to recognise Tuesday on Tuesday than on the last day of the month.

Step 4

Use the record for reporting

Once the time is properly logged, it is useful before an invoice is ever created — how much time went to a client, which pieces of work made up the total, whether a project is taking more time than expected, and what is worth sharing.

A report keeps the detail behind the total. Instead of 14.5 hours, you still have a record of what those hours covered.

Step 5

Hand the record to whatever you invoice with

Invoice day should be the end of the process, not the beginning of the investigation. If the time is already organised, you take the relevant period for that client and carry it into your invoicing or accounting system — grouped, priced and ready, rather than retyped from a spreadsheet.

That means less copying, less calculating and less chance of discovering a forgotten week of work five minutes before you want to send it.

The invoice still needs your judgement, and it still comes out of the system you already trust for VAT, numbering, archiving and the rules of your own country. What changes is that you are working from a record rather than memory.

Where Tidst stops, and why

Tidst does not issue invoices. It used to, and the honest reason for stopping is worth stating, because it is the same reason most time trackers that do issue them still hand off to an accounting system in the end.

An invoice is a legal document, not a PDF: It has to carry a sender address, a VAT number, a delivery period, tax treatment and an unbroken number series, and it has to be retained for years afterwards. Your accounting system does that. A time tracker producing a nice-looking PDF beside it is not the same thing, however similar it looks.
And the rules are moving: Structured, machine-readable e-invoicing becomes mandatory for business-to-business invoices in Belgium in 2026, in France and Poland across 2026 and 2027, and in Germany by 2028, with EU-wide reporting following. A PDF stops being enough in those markets. Keeping up with that is a full-time job for the companies that do it, and it is not what a time tracker is for.
What Tidst has that they do not: The hours. Your accounting system knows what you charged; it has no idea what the work cost you. Tidst groups the billable work for a client and period into priced lines, applies the client's rate or agreed fee, and keeps the detail behind each line — so what leaves Tidst is the part of the invoice you would otherwise assemble by hand.
And what only it can tell you: What the work actually paid per hour. On a fixed fee or a retainer that number exists nowhere else: the invoice says what you charged, and only the time record says what it took to earn it.

Different kinds of client work

Hourly work

For hourly work the connection is fairly direct. You record the billable time, apply the relevant rate and use that as the basis for the amount you charge.

The useful part is not the multiplication. It is knowing that the hours behind the number are complete enough to trust.

Fixed-fee work

Time tracking is still useful when the invoice contains no hours. Suppose you quoted a fixed price. Knowing how long it actually took tells you whether the price made sense.

A client in Tidst can be set to a fixed fee rather than an hourly rate. The hours still get logged, and Tidst divides the agreed amount by them — so a project that looked like 12 hours and became 28 stops being a feeling and becomes a number you can price the next one against.

The client may never need to see those hours. You probably should.

Retainers and ongoing clients

Ongoing work creates a different problem. There is no obvious project start and finish; work accumulates through the month. Small tasks and meetings are particularly easy to lose here, because no single item feels large enough to worry about.

A retainer in Tidst is a monthly agreement that resets on its own, and it can carry the hours it includes. That makes it possible to see what the client actually consumed during the period — and, because the same calculation runs each month, whether the workload is creeping beyond what was agreed.

It is easier to have that conversation with a number than with an impression.

The invoice does not need every internal detail

A good internal time record and a good client invoice are not necessarily the same thing. You may want detailed entries for yourself while giving the client a simpler summary.

Your internal record might contain four separate entries:

prepare campaign report
check tracking issue
client call
update audience setup

The invoice may group some of that work more broadly. Keeping the detail internally gives you the option.

You can simplify later. You cannot easily recreate detail that was never recorded.

Do not wait for a perfect system

A lot of time-tracking advice becomes complicated very quickly. You do not need a flawless workflow before you can improve invoice day.

Start with one client. Keep a decent record of the work. Review it often enough that you still remember what happened. Then use that record when it is time to bill.

That is already a substantial improvement over starting from memory at the end of the month.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to track time if I charge fixed fees?: Not for the invoice itself, but it still tells you whether the project was profitable. A client can be set to a fixed fee in Tidst, and the hours you log against it are divided into the agreed amount to show what the work actually paid per hour.
How often should I review my time?: Often enough that the work still makes sense when you look at it. For some that is daily; for others a few times a week is enough.
Should every time entry appear on the invoice?: No. Your internal record can be more detailed than what you present to the client. Entries can be merged into a single line, renamed, or left off the invoice entirely.
What if I forgot to record something?: Add it manually while you still have enough context to make a reasonable entry. Completed tasks and calendar events can help you reconstruct missing work, but no system can guarantee that every piece of work left a trace.
Can Tidst use completed Todoist tasks as part of this workflow?: Yes. Completed tasks from connected Todoist projects can appear in The Queue for review before they become logged time.
What about meetings?: Relevant meetings from connected Google Calendar and Outlook calendars can also appear as items to review, carrying their scheduled duration.
Does Tidst create invoices?: No, and that is deliberate. Tidst prepares what goes on the invoice — the billable work for a client and period, grouped, priced and reviewed — and you issue it in whatever you already invoice with. Structured e-invoicing is becoming mandatory for business-to-business invoices across much of the EU between 2026 and 2028, and a PDF generator bolted onto a time tracker cannot keep up with that. Your invoicing system can.
Does Tidst know whether an invoice was paid?: No. Tidst never sees the invoice, so it cannot see the payment either — that lives in the system that issued it. What Tidst can tell you, and your invoicing system cannot, is how much billable work is on the books that has not been sent anywhere yet.
Is Tidst free?: Yes. Everything currently available in Tidst is free to use.

Invoice day should not begin with "What did I do this month?"

Keep the work close enough to the time record that the invoice becomes the easy part.

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