Timescanner vs Timetackle

Timetackle answers a question most freelancers aren’t asking: “How much did our meetings cost this week?”

It’s a meeting analytics tool. Connect it to Google Calendar or Microsoft 365 and it calculates the cost of every meeting — based on participant salaries or hourly rates. It tracks focus time, meeting load, and time worked outside planned hours. The dashboard exists for teams trying to reduce unnecessary meetings: managers, HR, operations leads who want to justify cancelling the Thursday stand-up.

For a freelancer with two or three clients and a solo calendar, that’s not the problem.

What Timetackle does

Timetackle reads your calendar and measures meeting overhead. How many hours per week went to meetings. What those meetings cost. Whether you have enough uninterrupted blocks. Whether you’re working outside the hours you planned.

The meeting cost calculation is the headline feature: enter an hourly rate and Timetackle shows how much each meeting cost. Useful if you’re trying to convince a team to cancel a recurring call. Less useful if you’re trying to figure out what to invoice a client.

What Timetackle doesn’t do: generate billing totals, separate billable from non-billable, apply different rates per client, or produce anything resembling an invoice.

The difference between time awareness and billing

Knowing you spent 14 hours in meetings last month is useful for one thing: deciding whether to have fewer meetings. It doesn’t tell you how many of those hours were billable, for which client, at which rate.

That gap is where most freelancers lose money. Not because they forget to track — because the record they keep isn’t structured for billing. A meeting log becomes useful for invoicing only when you know who the client was and whether the meeting was in scope.

Timetackle is built for the question “are we spending our time well?” Timescanner is built for the question “what do I invoice this month?”

How the calendar becomes a billing record

The bracket naming convention turns any calendar event into a billing record: [ClientA] at the start of any billable event. Add a project tag: [ClientA][ProjectX]. Mark something as offered: [ClientA][O]. Five seconds when you create the event — that’s the only habit required.

Timescanner reads the iCal feed from any calendar. Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Proton Calendar, Notion Calendar, Fastmail — any iCal source works, not just Google. It separates billable from non-billable, applies your hourly rate per client, and outputs the billing total.

Month-end invoicing takes 15 minutes instead of three hours. The record was already in your calendar — it just needed the right labels.

Your data never leaves your calendar. Timescanner reads the feed, runs the calculation, returns the result. Nothing stored server-side.

Pricing

Timetackle: team-focused pricing with per-seat plans and enterprise tiers. Not designed or priced for solo freelancers.

Timescanner: €79/year, any iCal calendar. 30-day free trial, no credit card.

Which one you actually need

If you manage a team and want to understand the collective cost of your meeting culture — Timetackle is built for that.

If you’re a freelancer who wants to know what to invoice a client this month — Timetackle won’t answer that question regardless of how long you look at the dashboard. The metric you need isn’t meeting cost. It’s billable hours per client × rate.

The calendar already has the information. It just needs to be labeled so a tool can read it.

Comparing more options: best time tracking tools for freelancers.

Timescanner works with Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Proton Calendar, Notion Calendar, Fastmail, and any iCal-compatible calendar.