Search "timesheet app" and nearly every result is built for the person who approves your hours: fill in the week, submit it, wait for a manager to tick it off. TimePrivate is the other kind. It drafts your timesheet on your own Mac, files it in a local database, and has nobody to submit it to.
The template downloads today in any browser. The TimePrivate app is not released yet: Apple Silicon Macs first, Windows on the roadmap.
A timesheet app records which hours you worked on which day, against which job or client, and turns that into a week you can hand to payroll or to an invoice. Almost every timesheet app on the market is built around a second step, approval, which means the account belongs to an employer and an administrator can read, edit or close it. TimePrivate is built for the copy you keep for yourself.
TimePrivate is not released, so there is nothing to download or buy today. The template works right now, and it is free either way.
Strip the dashboards away and every timesheet app, TimePrivate included, is holding five facts per line. If a tool cannot give you all five back in a file, it is a reporting screen rather than a record.
Weeks are how payroll thinks, but days are the unit that gets disputed. A timesheet that only stores a weekly total cannot answer "which Tuesday".
"7.5 hours" is a claim. "08:30 to 17:00 with 60 minutes unpaid" is a record. The second one survives someone else recalculating it.
The single most common timesheet error is a meal break deducted twice, once by you and once by the system. Keep the number in its own column so you can see which happened.
A project, client or job code. Without it a timesheet totals your week but cannot produce an invoice line or explain where the week went.
Payroll wants 7.50, not 7.30. Any timesheet app worth using shows both, because you think in minutes and the pay run does not.
The sixth thing is not a field, it is a door. TimePrivate exports the lot to CSV, and you should check any timesheet app for the same before you type a month into it.
Under federal wage and hour rules the duty to keep hours worked sits with the employer, not with you, which is exactly why a personal copy is worth having: you are checking someone else's arithmetic rather than replacing it. The US Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division even publishes a timesheet app of its own aimed at workers keeping an independent record. Rules differ by state and by contract, so treat this as a checklist for picking a tool, not as legal advice.
Pick the Monday your week starts on and TimePrivate builds a blank seven day timesheet with the six columns above, dated and ready to fill in. The file is assembled inside this page, so nothing is submitted anywhere, there is no account, and no email is asked for.
The columns are Date, Day, Start, End, Unpaid break in minutes, Project or client, and Notes. Fill it by hand each evening and it does the job a timesheet app does, slowly. When you want the week added up for you, TimePrivate's free work hours calculator takes the same numbers and returns the total, the decimal figure, and the hours past 40. When you want to stop typing altogether, that is what the TimePrivate Mac app and the waitlist are for.
This works with TimePrivate's free template above, with a spreadsheet, or with any timesheet app you have been handed at work. Six steps, and the order matters: the last two are the ones people skip and then argue about.
Put the Monday date at the top and one date per row. TimePrivate's template does this for you from the date you pick, because a timesheet with days but no dates cannot be matched against a payslip later.
Enter 08:30 in Start and 17:00 in End. Do not write "7.5". The clock times let anyone, including you in four months, recompute the day. A total is the output, never the input.
Minutes, on the day they happened, in the Unpaid break column. Keeping it separate is how you catch a meal break being deducted twice, once by you and once by the payroll system, which is the most common timesheet error there is.
Split the day into two rows if you worked on two things. A week with no project column totals your hours but cannot produce an invoice line or answer where the week went.
Reconstructed weeks round to the nearest tidy number and lose the short jobs. If daily typing is what you keep failing at, that is the gap the TimePrivate Mac app fills: it drafts the day from what it saw and waits for you to sign it off.
Add the week up and convert: 7 hours 30 is 7.50, not 7.30. TimePrivate's free work hours calculator does that conversion and the over 40 split for you. Then save the file somewhere your employer's system cannot close.
A timesheet app is only worth the typing if the week can leave it. TimePrivate exports every approved day to CSV, and the free template above is already a CSV, so both feed the same four destinations.
Your employer runs the pay. Your TimePrivate CSV is the second opinion: the seven daily rows, the unpaid minutes and a decimal total to hold against the payslip. Under federal wage and hour rules the duty to keep hours worked sits with the employer, so this is checking their arithmetic, not doing their job.
Because every TimePrivate line carries a project or client, the CSV sorts into billable totals per client rather than one lump week. Working out what that comes to at your rate is what the TimePrivate billable hours and invoice calculator is for.
The TimePrivate CSV opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets with no importer and no connector, so you can pivot a quarter by client or chart where the hours went. CSV also means the file still opens in ten years, which no vendor dashboard can promise.
Employer workspaces close on your last day and the history goes with them. A TimePrivate local database plus an exported CSV both survive an account being switched off, which is the practical reason to keep a parallel record while you still have access.
Every timesheet app on the first page of this search falls into one of two camps, and TimePrivate is squarely in the second one. Neither camp is wrong. They answer different questions and they leave the file in different hands.
Clockify, Jibble and Timesheets.com all describe the same shape on their timesheet pages: employees fill a weekly timesheet, a manager approves it, an administrator exports it to payroll. Neutral market context, and a good fit if that is your situation.
Far thinner on this search. The Department of Labor app is here, and TimePrivate is here. No approver, no workspace owner, no admin role, because the point is a record that answers to you and nobody else. Billing clients from that record instead of handing it to an approver? That is the TimePrivate freelance time tracking app page.
In camp one, whoever holds the admin seat, today and after the next reorganisation. In the TimePrivate app there is no admin seat to hand out, no manager view and no team dashboard, so the question does not have a second answer.
Employer workspaces close on your last day and the timesheet history goes with them. A TimePrivate local database and an exported CSV both survive an account being switched off, which is the practical reason to keep a parallel record while you are still there.
Several timesheet apps on this search market a free tier, and Jibble markets its timesheet software as free outright. Free is real, and the trade is usually that the workspace and the data model belong to the vendor. Worth knowing, not a scandal.
TimePrivate has no approval queue, no manager view and no payroll run. If your job is collecting other people's timesheets, the camp one tools are the correct answer and this page is not.
Three of the top results for "timesheet app" are app store listings, and the rest are web apps you log into. TimePrivate is a native Mac app, which changes what it can see and what it has to ask you for.
If your day happens in a code editor, a design tool or a browser, the machine running those is the one that knows when you started. A phone timesheet app can only record what you remember to punch in, which is why the last hour of a Friday always looks tidy.
A web timesheet app needs an account, and an account needs an owner. The TimePrivate Mac app has no account at all, so the timesheet has no owner other than the person sitting at the keyboard.
Apple's App Privacy card and Google Play's Data safety card make a developer declare what an app collects. The TimePrivate app makes no network requests, has no telemetry, no analytics and no crash reporting, so there is nothing on that panel to weigh up.
Two honest limits, because they matter more than the pitch. TimePrivate cannot stop other software your employer installs on that Mac from watching you: it simply is not one of those programs, and it has no screenshots, no keystroke logging and no manager view to switch on. And this website is not the app. timeprivate.com runs Google Analytics, PostHog and Microsoft Clarity, all named on the TimePrivate privacy page. The app that collects nothing sits behind a site that measures its own traffic, and you should expect any timesheet app you shortlist to draw that line as plainly.
The template above is you doing the work. The TimePrivate Mac app is the same timesheet filled in on your behalf, in three moves, none of which involve submitting anything.
Automatic tracking notices which apps you are in and which browser domains you visit, then maps them to projects with rules you write once. App names and domains only, never screenshots and never keystrokes. Forget to start a timer and nothing is lost.
Each evening TimePrivate drafts the day from what it saw and hands it to you: accept it, edit it, or throw it away. This is the approval step, and you are the only approver. Nothing books itself into your week.
Approved days land in a local database on your Mac. Export the lot to CSV whenever you like, and if you want it on a second Mac, optional sync writes end to end encrypted files into a folder you choose. The rest of what the TimePrivate app does with those hours, from reports to offline invoices, sits on the home page.
The questions that come up alongside this search, answered plainly, including the ones where TimePrivate is not the answer.
A timesheet app records which hours you worked on which day, against which job or client, and totals them into a week that payroll or an invoice can use. Most of them add an approval step, so the workspace belongs to an employer or a client. TimePrivate is a timesheet app without that step: it drafts the week on your Mac and stores it in a local database that has no administrator.
Being straight about it: not TimePrivate, which is planned as a paid subscription at $9 a month or $79 a year and is not released yet. Several established timesheet tools run free tiers, and Jibble markets its timesheet software as free. The free version of the question that TimePrivate does answer today is the blank weekly timesheet template on this page and the work hours calculator, both free, both needing no account.
Google does not publish an app called Timesheet. What people usually mean is a timesheet template in Google Sheets, which is free with a Google account and keeps the file in your Google Drive. It works, and the trade is that the sheet lives in a cloud account rather than on your machine. TimePrivate's template downloads as a CSV to your own downloads folder and opens in Sheets, Excel or Numbers if you want it there anyway.
Not this one. If you need staff to submit hours, a manager to approve them and an export into payroll, look at the tools built for that: Clockify, Jibble and Timesheets.com all describe exactly that workflow on their timesheet pages. TimePrivate has no approval queue, no manager view and no payroll run, and adding them would break the thing it is for.
It depends on who needs to hold the record. For a one week total to check against a payslip, use TimePrivate's free work hours calculator and skip the install entirely. For punching in and out on a job site, a phone app. For hours your employer collects, whatever they bought. For your own history across months, kept on your machine, that is what the TimePrivate Mac app is for.
Yes, and it is ordinary practice rather than paranoia: the Department of Labor publishes a timesheet app aimed at workers doing precisely that. Keeping a parallel record is checking someone else's arithmetic, not replacing it. In TimePrivate your copy is a local database plus CSV export, so it is a file you hold rather than a row in an account someone else can close.
Date, day, start time, end time, unpaid break minutes, the project or client, and a notes field. Those are the columns in TimePrivate's free template above, and they are the minimum that lets someone recompute your week without asking you what you meant. A decimal total is worth adding at the bottom, because payroll systems ask for 7.50 rather than 7 hours 30.
It has no online mode to lose. The app makes no network requests at all, so a timesheet drafted on a plane behaves exactly like one drafted at your desk. Optional sync is the one thing that touches a folder, and it writes end to end encrypted files your cloud provider cannot read.
No. TimePrivate is not released, so there is nothing to download and nothing to pay for today. The waitlist is the whole offer: one email the day it opens. Planned pricing is $9 a month or $79 a year, subscription only.
Not yet. Mac ships first, on Apple Silicon, and Windows is on the roadmap. The timesheet template and the work hours calculator on this site are plain HTML and JavaScript, so both run in Edge, Chrome or Firefox on Windows and Linux today.
TimePrivate's weekly timesheet template is free and stays that way, so use it every week if you like. When you want the same week filled in without you typing it, the TimePrivate Mac app is what the waitlist is for. One email the day it opens, nothing else.
Not released yet. Leave your email and we will write to you the day it opens.