Freelancers and service providers record their hours where the quota, the approval and the invoice already live. At month end there is a proof of service your client signs off by link — and the invoice follows without anyone retyping a number.
| Woche / Modus | Mo | Di | Mi | Do | Fr | Σ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KW 27 · on-site | 8 | 8 | – | 8 | 8 | 32 |
| KW 27 · remote | – | – | 8 | – | – | 8 |
| KW 28 · remote | 8 | 8 | 8 | 6 | – | 30 |
For your own staff it is about working-time records and health and safety. For external consultants it is something else entirely: proof of work delivered — against a budget, against a quota, and ultimately to a client who has to approve it. Solve that with a system built for permanent employees and you are measuring the wrong thing.
What gets recorded is billable work on the project, split by on-site and remote because the two often carry different rates. Not when somebody entered the building.
Internal hours are signed off by a line manager. External hours are confirmed by the client — often someone with no access to your systems at all. Without that step, the invoice has no basis.
A booked hour consumes quota and creates cost in real time. Internal time tracking usually has no concept of that link — it was never built for it.
Internal hours become payroll. External hours become a supplier invoice with the mandatory details under §14 UStG — or a §19 small-business note. Two entirely different destinations.
Four steps, one system. No export to a spreadsheet, no timesheet in an email attachment, no retyping in finance.
Week by week in a grid: days across the columns, on-site and remote as separate rows. Days outside the project term are locked, and anything above ten hours a day raises a plausibility warning. The consultant sees only their own data — no rates, no margins, no colleagues.
At month end Kontingo produces a proof of service as a PDF — broken down by day, week and engagement type, carrying your project, quotation and contract numbers. This is the document that later belongs to the invoice and answers the auditor.
Your client receives an approval link — no account, no software. The view is read-only and data-minimised: hours and work delivered yes, your prices and margins no. Approve in one click, or reject with a comment. After approval the month is locked.
From the approved timesheet the consultant raises their invoice directly — the amount is calculated server-side from hours × rate, with 19 % VAT or the §19 small-business note. Or they upload their own invoice instead. Verification becomes a reconciliation rather than an investigation — and the approved month moves on as a DATEV export to your finance team or tax advisor.
What the consultant fills in — and what the client actually gets to see. Interface shown in German; English localisation available on request.
A consultant rarely spends five days in the same place. The grid keeps on-site and remote as separate rows because different rates and travel rules hang off them — as structure, not as an afterthought.
| Woche / Modus | Mo | Di | Mi | Do | Fr | Σ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KW 27 · on-site | 8 | 8 | – | 8 | 8 | 32 |
| KW 27 · remote | – | – | 8 | – | – | 8 |
| KW 28 · on-site | 8 | 8 | 8 | 6 | – | 30 |
| KW 29 · remote | 8 | 8 | 4 | U | U | 20 |
The approval link opens a reduced view: period, work delivered, hours — and two buttons. No rates, no margin, no access to other projects. Exactly as much as a defensible confirmation requires.
| Position | Tage | Std |
|---|---|---|
| Beratung on-site | 8 | 62 |
| Beratung remote | 4 | 28 |
| Urlaub / nicht verfügbar | 2 | – |
Time tracking is rarely an end in itself. The value shows up where those hours travel next.
Every booked hour feeds straight into the burndown for the assignment and the project. You see consumption against the quota and the forecast for when it runs out at the current booking rate — with a traffic light at thresholds you configure.
Capture, month-end, approval and invoice hang off one case, and every status change is logged. In a tax audit or an internal review you answer “who confirmed what, and when” from the system rather than from mailboxes.
Hours are captured once and never re-entered — not into a master spreadsheet, not into an email, not into finance. At the end of the chain sits a DATEV export of the approved work and amounts. Every hand-off that disappears is a class of error that can no longer happen.
No. There is no clock-in or clock-out, no attendance monitoring and no location check. What is recorded is hours delivered per day and engagement type — the figure that gets billed and confirmed by the client. How you structure external engagements contractually is a question for your legal team; Kontingo makes no assumptions about it and simply models the billing process.
No. Approval runs through a link to a read-only view — no account, no installation, no training. The view is data-minimised: your client sees the period, the work delivered and the hours, but neither your sell rates nor your buy rates or margins.
They reject with a comment, the month returns to draft, the consultant corrects it and resubmits. It stays the same case and the history stays visible — you can see later that a correction happened, and why.
It is a plausibility warning against typos, not a block and not a compliance check. It flags an unusually long day without preventing the entry — project reality includes long days, and whether they are permissible is not for the software to decide.
Kontingo records external delivery only and does not replace a system for your permanent staff. Classic time and attendance plans shifts, presence and capacity for your own workforce; Kontingo runs quota, proof, approval and invoicing for freelancers and service providers. The two run in parallel without getting in each other's way. More on the overview page.
In 30 minutes you will see what the same month looks like in Kontingo — from capture through to an approved invoice. No obligation, with your real numbers.
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