Kimai

Track every billable hour, without paying per seat to do it.

Time tracking tools charge for every person who records time, which means the cost grows with exactly the thing you want more of: people doing billable work. Kimai is the open source alternative: a complete time tracking and timesheet platform that records time against customers and projects, reports on it, and turns it into invoices, self-hosted so your time and client data stays on infrastructure you control. Node deploys and manages Kimai as a production service hosted in the UK, so your team gets dependable time tracking without the per-user meter.

What Kimai is

Kimai is an open source time tracking application built for teams that bill or budget by the hour: agencies, consultancies, professional services and internal teams that need to understand where time goes.

People record time from the browser or a mobile device, against a structure of customers, projects and activities, with start and stop timers or manual entry. Managers get timesheets with approval and locking, reporting across users, projects and date ranges, rates and budgets per customer or project, and invoice generation that turns recorded time into a billable document. It exports cleanly to the formats your finance process needs.

The result is full professional time tracking with the day-to-day simplicity your team will actually use, and none of the per-seat licensing that makes the tools expensive at scale.

Why Kimai with Node

No per-user subscription - seat-based time tracking charges for everyone who records an hour, so the bill scales with headcount. Kimai has no per-user licence. A managed deployment is a predictable cost no matter how large the team.

Your data stays yours - time records, client details and billing rates live on UK infrastructure you control, in open formats, exportable whenever you need rather than locked inside a SaaS account.

Set up for how you bill - rates, budgets, customer and project structures and approval workflows are configured to match how your organisation actually quotes, tracks and invoices work.

Single sign-on and oversight - we integrate Kimai with your identity provider so staff log in centrally, and we keep the platform monitored, backed up and upgraded so it is dependable at month-end when it matters most.

From tracked hour to billed invoice

The value of time tracking is realised at the point time becomes money, and Kimai is built to make that path short.

Billable and non-billable time - every entry is classified, so utilisation reporting and invoicing draw on accurate data and internal time is captured without polluting client bills.

Rates and budgets - hourly rates apply per customer, project or user, and project budgets track spend against plan in real time, so an overrun is visible while there is still time to act.

Approval and locking - submitted timesheets are reviewed, approved and locked, giving managers oversight and giving finance a clean, signed-off basis for billing.

Invoice export - approved time becomes an invoice through customisable templates, and reports export to the formats your accounting workflow expects.

How Kimai fits with the rest of your platform

Kimai sits naturally alongside the wider open source platform Node manages for you. Tracked, approved time feeds the billing and finance picture you run in ERPNext or Dolibarr, client structures line up with the customers you manage in EspoCRM, and access is governed through Keycloak single sign-on so the whole team logs in centrally. The platform is watched continuously by our Zabbix and Grafana monitoring so it is dependable when timesheets and invoices are due.

Open source Harvest and Toggl alternative

Kimai is the open source alternative to Harvest and Toggl for time tracking. It records time against customers, projects and activities, reports on utilisation, tracks budgets and turns approved time into invoices, self-hosted on infrastructure you control, with no per-user subscription.