Meter

You already know roughly what your time is worth. What you do not know, at four in the afternoon, is what today has actually come to — or whether this week is ahead of last. Meter puts both on a key.

Tap to start, tap to stop. While it runs the key shows what this session is worth, climbing, with the hours under it. When you stop, it is banked. That is the whole of it.

A METER YOU CAN SEE — Not a menu-bar icon you have to go and look at, and not an app you have to remember to open. It is a physical key on the desk in front of you, lit while it runs, showing a number that is going up. Which turns out to be the difference between tracking your time and meaning to.

KEYS THAT ADD IT UP — Put a Total key beside it for today, this week, this month, this year, or everything. Tap one and it steps through all five, so a single key can answer whichever question you are being asked. The running meter is counted in, so a week total is right at eleven in the morning and not only after you have pressed stop.

FOR THE METER YOU LEFT RUNNING — Hold the key and the session is thrown away instead of banked. Everybody does this once: a call ends, lunch happens, and two hours later there is an hour and fifty minutes on the clock that you did not work. The remedy is one press, not an argument with your own ledger. And if you forgot to start it at all, the settings will add or subtract minutes from any day.

FIGURES YOU CAN PUT ON AN INVOICE — The arithmetic is the product, so it is done properly. The book holds whole cents rather than floating-point numbers, because 0.1 plus 0.2 is not 0.3 and a ledger that drifts by a cent an hour is one you find out about at invoice time. Time is the difference between two timestamps rather than a count of ticks, so a busy machine, a laptop asleep in a bag or a restart of the Stream Deck app cannot lose an hour of billable work.

IT KNOWS WHAT A DAY IS — A session that runs past midnight is split at the boundary and filed under both days, because "what did I earn on Tuesday" has to mean Tuesday. Weeks start on Monday or Sunday, whichever you use. Months and years follow the calendar, including the ones where the clocks change — a week containing the spring forward is still seven days.

A RAISE IS NOT BACKDATED — Change your rate and the days already in the book keep what they were worth when you worked them. Anything else would silently restate every invoice you have already sent.

BILL THE WAY YOU BILL — To the second, or in whole minutes, six-minute units, quarter hours, half hours or whole hours. The convention is applied once, when the session closes; the running figure is always the real one. Thirteen currencies, formatted the way your machine formats money.

NOTHING LEAVES YOUR MACHINE — No account, no sign-in, no network requests, no analytics, no cloud, no subscription. Your book lives in Stream Deck's own settings, on your disk, and the plugin has nothing to phone home with.

Works on any Stream Deck with keys, on macOS and Windows. Requires the Stream Deck app 7.1 or newer. One key for the meter; as many Total keys as you want.

The meter

Tap to start, tap to stop. Running, the key shows what the session is worth so far with the hours under it; stopped, it shows your rate.

Hold to throw a session away instead of banking it — for the meter you left running over lunch, which everybody does once.

A label for the client, and thirteen currencies.

The totals

Today, this week, this month, this year, or all of it. One key per period, or tap a key to step through all five.

The running meter is counted in, so a week total is right at eleven in the morning and not only after you press stop.

Weeks start on Monday or Sunday, whichever you use.

Figures you can put on an invoice

The book holds whole cents, not floating-point numbers: 0.1 plus 0.2 is not 0.3, and a ledger that drifts by a cent an hour is one you find out about at invoice time.

Time is the difference between two timestamps, never a count of ticks, so a laptop asleep in a bag cannot lose billable work.

A session past midnight is split and filed under both days.

Change your rate and the days already banked keep what they were worth.

Bill to the second, or in minutes, six-minute units, quarter or half hours, or whole hours. Applied once, when the session closes.

Forgot to start it? Add or subtract minutes from any day in the settings.

No account, no network, no analytics. The book lives in Stream Deck's own settings, on your machine.