Kimai — The Complete Guide: Time Tracking per Client and Project for Design Offices
Kimai is a browser-based time-tracking system that you install on your office’s own server. For a design office that bills by the hour it answers the recurring question: how many hours really went into each project, and who worked on it.
Kimai
Kimai
Self-hosted time tracking — log hours per client, project and activity, with reports and invoices.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Clients, projects and activities — a structure that maps well onto design stages.
- Budgets — track logged hours against what was priced in the fee proposal.
- Users and permissions — unlimited users with role-based access.
- Reports and invoices — invoices generated from templates.
- Export — to Excel, PDF and CSV.
What is free and what is paid
The self-hosted edition is open source (AGPL-3.0) and free for any use, including commercial work. Paid options are the managed Kimai Cloud service and some marketplace plugins, for example the Expenses plugin. Installation needs a server with SSH or Docker access — basic web hosting is not enough.
Related tools
For task and issue tracking — Redmine. For a simple task board — Kanboard. For scheduling and Gantt charts — OpenProject.
Redmine
Redmine Project
Task and issue tracking for an engineering project — with Gantt, time tracking and documentation.
Get it from the vendorKanboard
Kanboard Project
A very simple Kanban board — what is in progress, what is waiting and what is done.
Get it from the vendorOpenProject — Community Edition
OpenProject GmbH
Team project management in the browser — Gantt, tasks, documents and time tracking, self-hosted.
Get it from the vendor
ActivityWatch
ActivityWatch
Automatic, private time tracking — which programs and documents you worked on, for accurate timesheets.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
If someone in the office can look after a server, Kimai gives you proper time records and invoices with no per-user subscription fees.