If you want to know whether your designers are full before you hire a fourth, you do not need to track time forever. Log four weeks with a cheap timer or a shared sheet, then plan capacity from the averages. Here is the difference between tracking time and planning capacity, what the tools cost for a team of six, and the four-week method we would use.
Time tracking looks back, capacity planning looks forward
Time records describe effort already spent. Capacity planning describes work people can still accept. A timer tells you last week's social set took five hours, two of them spent restarting after the client went quiet. A capacity plan tells you how many of this week's production hours are already promised to committed requests and to restarts you know are coming. You need the first to make the second honest, but only the second answers the question you are really asking: can we take another client?
A four-week sample instead of tracking forever
Here is what we suggest. Pick four ordinary weeks, not a launch month or the August lull. Ask everyone who designs, including you, to log time against three categories only:
- Production: making the thing the client asked for.
- Revisions and restarts: changing delivered work, and reopening a file after it sat waiting for feedback.
- Client communication: calls, Slack replies, briefing and handover notes.
Three categories is a suggestion, not a rule, but stop there. Every extra category costs your designers attention and rarely changes a decision. Log against the request card, not the minute: start the timer when you open the file, stop it when you move on. Rounding to the nearest quarter-hour is fine.
At the end of week four, work out three averages: production hours per request, revision and restart hours per request, and communication hours per client per week. Put them into the pricing and capacity worksheet in place of your guesses.
The capacity and profitability guide works from illustrative figures. Assume about 26 production hours a week for a full-time designer, about 22 for a solo founder, and a 4-hour average request. That is 6.5 requests a week per designer. Now suppose your sample shows the average request really takes 5 hours once revisions are counted. The same designer holds 5.2 requests a week. Across three designers, that is about four requests a week you thought you had and do not. Those numbers are an example; your own sample replaces them.
Then stop tracking, or keep it light: one week a quarter, or a fresh sample when a new request type appears. Tell the team up front what the data is for and who sees it. Use it to price and plan, and avoid turning rough estimates into individual performance rankings. Once people think the timer is a scorecard, the numbers stop being true.
Working solo and planning your first subscription? Run the same four weeks on your current project work before you set a price. The service design and pricing guide shows where your real production hours go into a monthly fee.
Tools and what they cost for six people
Every tool below has a timer. The first six are time trackers or all-in-one studio tools. Float and Resource Guru are resource planners, built for the forward look. All bill in US dollars, and the six-person column is the list price multiplied out.
| Tool | Free option | Entry plan | Six people a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clockify | Free plan up to 5 users | Basic, $4.99 per user billed monthly, $3.99 annually | $29.94 billed monthly |
| Toggl Track | Free forever plan; 30-day trial | Starter, $9 per user | $54 (billing cadence not confirmed) |
| Harvest | Free for 1 seat and 2 projects | Teams, $9 per seat | $54 |
| Everhour | Free plan up to 5 seats | Team, $8.50 per seat billed annually, 5-seat minimum | $51 billed annually |
| Bonsai | 7-day trial only | Basic, $15 per user billed monthly, $9 annually | $90 monthly or $54 annually |
| Moxie | 14-day trial | Teams, $40 a month for up to 5 team members | No sixth-seat price published |
| Float (planner) | 30-day trial | Starter, $7 per scheduled person; Pro with time tracking $12 | $42 on Starter, $72 on Pro |
| Resource Guru (planner) | Trial, no card needed | Grasshopper, $5 per person billed monthly, $4.16 annually | $30 billed monthly |
For a four-week sample, the cheapest fit for six is Clockify: one month on Basic costs $29.94. If only five of you design, its free plan covers the whole sample, and so does Everhour's free plan for up to five seats. Toggl Track Starter is $9 per user, though our price check could not confirm whether that is the monthly or annual rate; its 30-day trial is long enough for most of a sample. Harvest Teams is $9 per seat, and its free plan stops at one seat.
If you already run invoices through an all-in-one tool, check its timer before adding another login. Bonsai includes time tracking and timesheets on every plan. Basic is $15 per user billed monthly or $9 billed annually. Its capacity tracking starts on Premium at $39 per user billed monthly, which is $234 a month for six. Moxie lists time tracking on Starter at $12 a month and Pro at $25 a month. Teams is $40 a month for up to five team members (all). Its pricing page gives no price for a sixth person, so ask before you sign up the whole studio. Working alone, Clockify's free plan or Moxie Starter is enough.
Float and Resource Guru let you place requests on each person's week and see who is free. Float Starter is $7 per scheduled person a month and Pro, which adds time tracking, is $12. Resource Guru Grasshopper is $5 per person billed monthly, and it charges for every person on the account whether they log in or not. The subscription is cheap. The upkeep is not: someone has to move every booking when a client goes quiet or a request doubles in size. Do not buy a resource planner below about ten people. At six, your board plus a worksheet shows the same thing, and nobody has to keep two schedules in step.
Tracking revisions and waiting work
Revisions are where the week goes missing, and they are the hardest thing to time. A designer fixing a headline for ten minutes between two other jobs will not start a timer. So count them instead.
- Add a restart tally to each request card: one tick every time someone reopens the file after the client comes back.
- Keep requests in "Waiting on client" visible on the board, never archived, with a restart estimate of 1 to 2 hours each.
- On Friday, multiply the week's ticks by the average restart time from your four-week sample.
That gives you a revision figure without anyone logging every minute. If waiting requests keep piling up, you have a queue problem, not a tracking problem. Under the one active request rule, a request that is waiting on feedback still owes you a restart, so decide how long it can wait before it closes.
And if two clients keep asking what is in progress, show them the board, not the timesheet. Time data is for your planning. Clients need status.
When a spreadsheet is enough
A maintained worksheet plus a monthly review is enough for a small, stable service, as long as one named person owns that review. In Google Sheets that means one row per designer with their production hours, one row per client with delivered requests per week, and the averages from your sample. Once a month, the owner updates it from last month's board and checks whether the answer to "can we take another client?" has changed.
Look at specialist tooling when the sheet stops answering: two people keep getting booked into the same week, or restarts overrun your revision buffer month after month. A dashboard that looks more precise is not a reason on its own.