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Like a lot of side projects, F The Hours started with a problem we kept having ourselves.

Every January, a small ritual would play out. Open the laptop. Open six spreadsheets. Open a folder of receipts photographed at petrol stations. Open the HMRC website. Spend the next two weekends piecing together what last year looked like, hoping the number at the bottom was not a horror story.

We tried the big accounting tools. They were powerful, but they were built for accountants, not for the person doing the work. They asked about ledgers and double-entry bookkeeping when all you wanted was to log two hours of design work and bill someone properly for it.

We tried the simple time trackers. They were lovely. They also had no idea you live in the UK. No payments on account, no Class 2 National Insurance, no mileage rate drop at 10,000 miles, no Self Assessment boxes. Good for telling you that you worked 32 hours this week, and no help at all in April.

So we built our own

F The Hours is the tool we wanted: one place to log your time, send invoices that look like they came from a real business, track expenses and mileage, and see a live estimate of what HMRC will want back. Not in January. Now, so there are no surprises.

We made some early decisions that we still stand by:

• UK first, not US with a pound sign. Every rate, band and box follows the HMRC rules.
• Your data is yours. Export it any time. We do not sell it and we do not run adverts.
• Invoices that look professional. A clean PDF with your details, the client’s and a proper invoice number. Free tools tend to make invoices that look free, and the invoice is the one thing your client actually sees.
• A Starter plan that works. Most people do not need the advanced features, so Starter covers the essentials at a price that is easy to justify, and every plan is free while the beta is open.
• Simple beats clever. If you need a tutorial to add a time entry, we have already lost.

We are still small and still learning. Every email, bug report and “could you maybe add” is read by a person, usually one of the people who built the feature you are writing about.

Thanks for being here. Now go log your hours.