Everything melancer does, and where it stops

Time tracking for freelancers, in the browser

Melancer starts from the hour. Start the timer when you sit down, switch it to another task when the phone rings, and stop it when you are done. It keeps running when you close the tab, and the elapsed time is on the page without installing anything.

For the afternoon you forgot to start it, write the hours down afterwards. An entry can be edited, split in two at a given time, or merged with the one next to it, and melancer refuses entries that overlap, so a day never adds up to more hours than it had.

Every entry belongs to a project, and every project to a client, so each hour already knows who pays for it. Add a ticket reference such as #214 or SHOP-42, and it becomes a link into GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Linear or your own tracker.

Coming from Toggl Track, Clockify or Harvest? Bring your history with you. Upload the detailed report your old tool exports as CSV, and melancer shows what it would bring in before anything is saved: which of your clients and projects each name matches, which ones are new, and which rows it leaves out and why. Time the old tool already invoiced is marked as billed elsewhere, so it counts in your statistics but never lands on an invoice twice, and a whole import can be undone in one step.

You can also log time without opening melancer at all. Its MCP server lets an AI assistant such as Claude Code, Cursor or VS Code log the hours you tell it about ("two hours on SHOP-42 for the migration"), start and stop the timer, and tell you what you tracked this week. A JSON API does the same for your own scripts. Both follow the same rules as the day view, and the token you create under Settings decides whether they may only read or also log time.

A timesheet your client opens themselves

An invoice should never be the first time a client sees a number. A report link shows one client their own hours for a week or a month: per day, per project and per ticket, and if you want, the amounts and the budget.

The client needs no account. They open the link, see the current period and the ones before it, and can print it or save it as a PDF. Once a period is over, the report is frozen as the client first saw it, so the number they agreed to cannot change afterwards.

The link shows that client and nothing else in your account. You can revoke it or let it expire, it sets no cookie, and it tells search engines to stay away.

Expenses with their receipts

Write down what the business spent as the receipt reads it: the supplier, the gross amount and the VAT rate. Melancer works out the input tax, and keeps the receipt itself, a PDF or a phone photo, with the entry.

Mark a cost as not deductible, such as the private share of a phone bill, and it stays out of the input tax. Mark it as reimbursable for a client, and the next invoice for that client puts it on a line.

The VAT figures and the DATEV export

Melancer prepares the figures a German freelancer has to file, in the shape the form asks for: the VAT return with its real Kennziffern, under Soll or Ist taxation, per month, quarter or year, and the recapitulative statement (ZM) for reverse-charge clients. Each figure opens to the invoices and expenses behind it.

As a Kleinunternehmer under § 19 UStG, you see this year's and last year's turnover against the limits, with a warning well before a limit is reached. For an amount in another currency, melancer uses the monthly exchange rate you enter from the Federal Ministry of Finance's table.

At the end of a period, take a DATEV archive to your tax advisor: the bookings with the invoice PDFs and the receipts inside. Melancer is not a tax advisor, prepares figures rather than returns, and files nothing with the tax office.