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The best developers are the worst at tracking time.
Not because they're lazy. Because the work doesn't map to hours.
A senior dev fixes a bug in 10 minutes that a junior dev would've spent 3 hours finding. A one-line config change saves the client from a $50k outage. A mass refactor takes 8 hours but adds zero features.
How do you bill for that? Start a timer and hope the numbers make sense?
GitHub has no native time tracking. That's not an oversight. It's because code work resists the stopwatch. But agencies and freelancers still need to bill clients. So let's talk about what actually works.
GitHub is where code lives. Issues, pull requests, commits, reviews. It's a development tool, not a billing tool.
There's no timer button on issues. No "log hours" field on PRs. No invoicing tab.
If you want to track time in GitHub, you need a third party integration. Everhour, Harvest, Toggl, TimeCamp. They add buttons to the GitHub interface so you can start and stop timers on issues.
But here's the thing: developers don't use them.
They forget to start the timer. They forget to stop it. They work on three things at once and the timer is on the wrong one. They go down a rabbit hole and emerge 4 hours later with no idea how to allocate the time.
Time tracking works fine for linear work. Support tickets. Meetings. Tasks with clear start and end points.
Development isn't linear. It's exploratory. You think you're working on Issue A, but really you're debugging something in Issue B that's blocking Issue C. Your git log shows 47 commits across 6 branches. Good luck mapping that to a timesheet.
Despite all this, agencies need to bill clients. So people bolt on time trackers and do their best.
Everhour embeds timers directly in GitHub. Start and stop from issues or PRs. Budget tracking, reports, basic invoicing. Popular with agencies. Starts at $8.50/user/month.
Harvest adds a "Track Time" button to issues and PRs via browser extension. Good invoicing features, integrates with accounting software. Starts at $10.80/user/month.
Toggl is simpler. Browser extension, timers, reports. No invoicing. Good free tier for freelancers who just need basic tracking.
TimeCamp offers free GitHub time tracking with automatic tracking features. Tries to detect what you're working on based on activity.
All of these work. Sort of. They give you numbers you can put on an invoice. Whether those numbers reflect reality is another question.
Time tracking assumes a relationship between hours and value. More hours, more value. Bill accordingly.
Development breaks this assumption constantly.
The 10 minute fix that required 10 years of experience to know where to look. The architectural decision that took an hour but saved 6 months of tech debt. The "simple" feature that ballooned into 40 hours because the codebase was a mess.
When you bill hourly, you're incentivizing the wrong things. Slow work pays better than fast work. Experience gets penalized. The developer who solves it in 20 minutes bills less than the one who takes all day.
Some agencies solve this with fixed pricing. Estimate the work, quote a price, deliver it. The client pays for the outcome, not the hours.
But even then, you need to track something internally. You need to know if you're making money on this client. You need to understand where time actually goes so you can estimate better next time.
Here's a different approach.
Instead of asking developers to track hours, what if you tracked deliverables? Issues closed. PRs merged. Commits shipped.
That's what actually matters to clients anyway. They don't care that you spent 6 hours on their project. They care that the bug is fixed, the feature works, the deploy went out.
Rinkta takes this approach. It connects to GitHub and watches work happen. When an issue gets closed or a PR gets merged, Rinkta captures it automatically and creates a billing entry.
No timers. No "how many hours was that?" guessing at the end of the week.
The billing entry includes what was done (linked to the actual issue or PR) and an estimated time based on the scope and complexity. You can adjust the estimate if it's off. Over time, it learns your patterns.
The invoice shows real deliverables. "Fixed authentication bug (Issue #342). Implemented user export feature (PR #89). Updated CI pipeline (PR #91)."
Clients see what they paid for. You see revenue mapped to actual output. The awkward fiction of precise hourly tracking goes away.
To be fair, sometimes hourly billing is the right model.
Ongoing maintenance contracts where the scope is undefined. Staff augmentation where you're essentially lending a person. Discovery phases where you're exploring before committing to a fixed price.
In these cases, you do need to track hours. But even then, the question is whether timers are the best way to do it.
Manual time entry at the end of the day, based on what you actually remember doing, might be just as accurate as a timer you forgot to stop when you went to lunch.
The point isn't that time tracking is always wrong. It's that for development work, the relationship between hours logged and value delivered is fuzzy enough that obsessing over precise tracking is often wasted effort.
Does GitHub have built in time tracking?
No. GitHub tracks commits, issues, PRs, and code review. It has no native time tracking or invoicing features. You need third party tools like Everhour, Harvest, or Toggl.
What's the best GitHub time tracking integration?
Depends on your needs. Everhour is popular for teams who want budgets and light invoicing. Harvest is good if you need full invoicing with payment processing. Toggl is simple and has a solid free tier.
How does Rinkta work with GitHub?
Rinkta connects to your GitHub repos and watches for closed issues and merged PRs. When work is completed, it creates a billing entry automatically. No timers needed. You review and send the invoice.
Is hourly billing bad for developers?
Not always, but it has problems. It penalizes efficiency (fast work bills less), ignores the value of experience, and creates incentives to pad hours. Fixed pricing or value based billing often works better for project work.
Here's the deal.Use it free for 7 days. If you don't save at least a couple hours or find work you should have billed, we'll refund everything. No questions, no hassle.
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