TL;DR
Time categories in Plutio let freelancers and agencies assign a work type to every time entry, so hours break down by design, development, meetings, admin, research, or any custom category, and timesheets show exactly where time went on each project.
Plutio stores the category on every time entry alongside the billing rate, cost rate, and billable status. Filter timesheets by category to isolate billable design hours from non-billable admin hours, and combine categories with billing rates to calculate earnings per work type. Over 35% of Plutio users on team plans assign categories to time entries weekly, and those teams report spending 2 to 3 fewer hours per month reconciling timesheets because the breakdown is already built into the data.
Time categories are available on all Plutio plans starting at $19/month, with a 7-day free trial. Categories appear on the time entry form when starting a timer or adding a manual entry, so tagging takes one click.
What time categories are
Time categories are labels assigned to individual time entries that classify hours by work type, such as design, development, meetings, admin, research, or strategy, so timesheets break down by activity rather than showing one undifferentiated block of hours per project.
In Plutio, each time entry stores a category field alongside the project, task, billing rate, cost rate, and billable status. When starting a timer from the navigation bar or adding a manual entry in the Timesheets section, select a category from the dropdown to tag that session. Plutio validates the category before saving, so entries always map to a recognized work type. Categories can be added, renamed, or removed in the workspace settings to match how the business actually operates.
Default categories and custom labels
Plutio ships with common default categories like Design, Development, Meetings, Admin, and Research. These cover the most frequent work types for freelancers and agencies. For businesses with specialized workflows, custom categories can be created in workspace settings. A video production agency might add Scripting, Filming, Color Grading, and Sound Design. A marketing consultancy might add Strategy, Content Writing, SEO Audit, and Reporting. The category list is workspace-wide, so every team member selects from the same set, keeping timesheet data consistent across projects.
Category-level filtering and reporting
The Timesheets section in Plutio supports filtering by category. Select one or multiple categories to see only those entries across all projects or within a specific project. The stats bar updates in real time, showing total tracked hours, billable amount, cost amount, and paid amount for the filtered view. Combined with date range filters, category filtering answers questions like "How many hours went to client meetings across all projects in March?" or "What was the total billable amount for development work on Project X last quarter?" Category-level filtering turns raw timesheets into an earnings report by work type, without exporting data to a spreadsheet or connecting a third-party analytics tool.
Before categories, my timesheets were just a list of hours. Now I can see that 40% of my time on a project went to revisions instead of the design work I scoped. That changed how I price fixed-fee projects.
Why time categories matter for freelancers
Without categories, a timesheet shows 40 hours logged against a project but gives no indication whether those hours went to high-value production work or low-value admin and revisions. A freelance developer who bills $120/hour for development but spends 30% of project time on non-billable client calls and status updates is effectively working at $84/hour without knowing it. The gap only surfaces when category-level data exists.
The consequence shows up in pricing. Freelancers who estimate projects based on production hours alone consistently underprice, because the admin, meetings, and revision cycles that surround the core work are invisible in uncategorized timesheets. On a $6,000 development project estimated at 50 hours, 15 hours of uncategorized meetings and email threads push the effective hourly rate from $120 to $86, a 28% drop that doesn't appear in any report until the hours are tagged by type.
Toggl Track offers tags on time entries for categorization, and the free plan includes basic tag filtering in reports. But Toggl has no native invoicing, so tagged time entries sit in Toggl reports and have to be manually recreated in a separate billing tool like QuickBooks or FreshBooks. The category data helps with internal analysis but doesn't connect to the billing workflow. Clockify includes tags on its free plan with similar reporting, but also lacks native invoicing and project management, so the data lives in isolation from the rest of the project.
The most expensive blind spot for freelancers billing hourly is not unbilled time but mispriced time, hours spent on revision cycles and meetings that were never factored into the original estimate because no category data existed from previous projects.
Plutio connects categories directly to billing rates and invoicing. A time entry categorized as Development at $120/hour and another categorized as Admin at $0/hour (non-billable) create a real earnings picture per project, and that data carries forward into future project estimates.
How time categories work in Plutio
Select a category when starting a timer or adding a manual time entry, and Plutio tags that session so timesheets can be filtered, grouped, and reported by work type across all projects.
Before starting, check that categories are configured in workspace settings. Plutio includes default categories (Design, Development, Meetings, Admin, Research), and custom categories can be added from the same settings screen.
Step by step
- Step 1: Click the timer icon in Plutio's navigation bar to start a new time entry. Assign the entry to a project and optionally a specific task.
- Step 2: Select a category from the category dropdown on the time entry form. Choose from default options like Design, Development, Meetings, or Admin, or pick a custom category created in workspace settings.
- Step 3: Work on the task with the timer running. Stop the timer when the session ends. The time entry saves to the Timesheets section with the category, duration, billing rate, and calculated billable amount.
- Step 4: Open the Timesheets section and filter by category to see all entries tagged with a specific work type. Combine with project, person, and date range filters to narrow the view further.
- Step 5: Review the stats bar showing total hours, billable amount, and cost amount for the filtered category. Use the data to compare how many hours went to production work versus admin across a project or time period.
Practical tip: set the category before starting the timer, not after. Entries added without a category are harder to tag retroactively when reviewing timesheets at the end of the week, and missing categories reduce the accuracy of earnings reports.
Who needs time categories
Freelancers and agencies billing hourly rates across multiple work types on the same project, particularly developers, designers, consultants, and creative agencies with mixed billable and non-billable activities, get the most value from time categories.
A freelance web developer billing $100/hour on a $8,000 project needs to know how many of those 80 hours went to actual development versus client meetings, debugging, and project coordination. Without categories, the timesheet says 80 hours. With categories, the breakdown might show 52 hours of development, 12 hours of meetings, 10 hours of revisions, and 6 hours of admin. The category breakdown directly shapes how the next similar project gets priced, because the developer now knows a "80-hour development project" actually requires 28 hours of non-development time. Over a year of projects, that pricing adjustment alone can add $5,000 to $10,000 in recovered revenue.
Agencies with 3 to 10 team members need category data to manage staffing. When timesheets show that a senior designer spends 25% of billable hours in client meetings instead of design production, the agency can reassign meeting attendance to a project coordinator and reclaim 10+ hours of high-rate design time per month. Category reports make that pattern visible across the team, not just anecdotally.
Freelancers switching from Toggl often want the same tagging functionality but connected to invoicing and project management in one workspace. Toggl's tags work for internal reporting, but converting tagged hours into billable invoice line items requires exporting to a separate tool. In Plutio, categorized time entries flow directly into invoices with the billing amount already calculated. HoneyBook has no time category support at all, so freelancers moving from HoneyBook gain an entirely new layer of time tracking visibility in Plutio.
Bottom line: any freelancer or agency tracking more than 20 billable hours per week across mixed work types saves money by categorizing time, because the category data reveals which activities earn the most per hour and which ones quietly erode margins.
