How to Keep a Personal Record of Hours Worked | HourStamp

The short answer

Most people searching this are not really looking for an app. They are looking for evidence that they kept something. HourStamp is built around that: stamping a record freezes its device time, the pay settings captured for it, and its day-level calculation, and any explicit later edit is kept as a revision entry rather than quietly replacing what was there. The ledger lives on your device — no account, no ads, no loans — and Pro exports a shareable PDF personal period report you can hand to someone. That report is a summary of your records, not a wage determination, and the rest of this page is about what that distinction buys you and where it stops. HourStamp is on the App Store.

Why you want a personal record at all

The problem behind this search is rarely "where do timesheets live". It is that a pay question usually gets settled on paper, and there is nothing on your side of the table.

Concretely, the things you might have instead all fail at a different point:

• Your memory. It is the weakest evidence you own. It is also the only evidence most people have.
• A photo of the payslip. It shows a net number, not the hours, the rate, or which day type produced the money. It proves you were paid; it does not prove how the figure was reached.
• A spreadsheet. It is a table of numbers that says nothing about when a shift ended or what settings were in force. Anyone can edit one, and nothing shows whether they did.
• An app with an account. It works until the company changes, the server closes, or the export path quietly disappears.

What actually helps is a record that shows the calculation, records when it was made, and shows its own history. That is a stricter requirement than "keep track of my hours", and it is why "which app tracks hours" is the wrong question and "what does a record have to survive to count as a record" is the right one.

What a stamp freezes — and what it does not

Stamping a record captures three things together: the device time, the pay settings in force for that record, and the day-level calculation those settings produced. All three, at once, at the moment you stamp.

Why the settings matter more than the timestamp: the usual disagreement about a pay period is not "did I work that day" — both sides agree you did. It is which basis applied. The hourly basis dispute — the 21.75-day and 174-hour convention against the statutory 166.64 — is spelled out in HourStamp so you can choose, and the holiday calendar that classified a day as a weekday, a rest day, or a statutory holiday is what turns a flat day into a multiplied one. HourStamp walks through the arithmetic in how the pay estimate is calculated, and covers the day classification in public holidays and make-up workdays. The point for this page is narrower: if you change your hourly rate in June, a stamped March record still carries what you used in March. The argument becomes "these two numbers differ" instead of "what rate did you have back then?"

Now the honest limit, stated by the app itself: a stamp is not third-party trusted time. It is your device's record of a moment. It is not notarised, it is not countersigned by a server, and it carries whatever your phone's clock said at that instant — a wrong clock is faithfully preserved, which is precisely what "device time" means. It is good personal record keeping. It is not evidence a court will treat as independently verified.

The edit problem

Most record-keeping apps overwrite. If a figure quietly changes, the record is worth less than one that had never changed, because you can no longer say what you believed at the time.

HourStamp keeps a revision entry for explicit later edits. The original stays traceable. That means a record that changed is visibly a record that changed — not one that quietly disagrees with the export you sent last month.

Two limits belong with it. A revision entry is a sequence, not a signed statement: it shows that something changed and when, not who was right or why. And it does not make editing free — you can still edit, and the trail exists because of editing rather than instead of it. The guarantee is that edits are visible, not that edits are blocked.

What "on device" buys, and what it costs

Ledgers are stored on your device by default. There is no account system. There are no ads and no cross-app tracking, and the App Store listing declares no third-party content. Camera, photos and location are used only after you grant permission. For a tool that holds your income record, the absence of loans is not a minor omission — a payday-advance offer aimed at a user who has just logged that they are short is a business model that disqualifies the app on its own.

The cost is real and it is one thing: if you lose or wipe the phone, the ledger goes with it. Automatic iCloud sync is not promised as a first-release capability. The mitigation is the manual backup file you export yourself, which means the safety of your record depends on a habit you have to actually form.

That is the trade, stated plainly: privacy and simplicity in exchange for an export discipline. If you will take the backup, local-only storage is a real advantage. If you will not, it is a risk, and the honest time to learn that is before you have three months of records in it.

What the PDF is, and what it is not

Pro unlocks the shareable PDF personal period report, available from the Records tab and from the Pro banner in the Mine tab. In the free tier the row is visible but badged PRO; after purchase it opens directly, and the unlock is real-time. If you move to another phone, "Restore purchases" on the paywall re-applies it.

What it is: a summary of your records. It presents the ledger and lays out the calculation behind it.

What it is not: a wage determination, legal advice, third-party verification, or anything an arbitrator or a court has concluded. It is what you recorded, formatted for reading.

Which is exactly why the earlier sections matter. The report is only as convincing as the records inside it, so a stamp that froze the settings and a revision trail that shows the edits are what make the export worth handing over rather than worth retyping.

What HourStamp does differently

The difference is that HourStamp is built around the record rather than the total. In practice:

• Stamping freezes the pay settings and the day calculation, not just a timestamp, so a later rate change cannot retroactively rewrite what a day was worth.
• Explicit edits keep a revision entry instead of overwriting.
• The ledger is on device, with no account and a manual backup export.
• No ads, no loans, no third-party content — declared in the listing, not implied.
• The app calls its own numbers estimates, in the store description and in its FAQ, rather than presenting a total you are invited to trust.

And the limits, stated as plainly as the features:

• The first release focuses on monthly-salary overtime logging and estimates. If your pay is hourly-per-shift or piecework, check how your scheme is modelled before you commit three months of records to it.
• A stamp is not trusted time and the PDF is not a determination. If your situation needs independent third-party evidence, this is the wrong tool, and it is honest about being the wrong tool.
• Payslip recognition can be incomplete; the original document and a manual review remain the authority.
• There is no automatic cloud sync. The backup is yours to take.
• The record is only as good as the discipline behind it. Stamp when you log, export the backup on a schedule, and read the estimate before the period closes — an app that records badly for you records badly.

What to do next

If your goal is proof rather than arithmetic, you now know what to look for: a record that freezes the settings behind each day, keeps its own edits visible, never asks you to register, and can be produced as a document without asking anyone for permission.

If that is what you need, HourStamp is on the App Store — free for logging, estimates, ledgers and statistics, with Pro at $0.99/month, $3.99/year or $9.99 once. The product page and the FAQ cover the schemes and the day-type multipliers. Read how the estimate is calculated first if the number is the thing you are disputing; if it is the record you are missing, this is the page you wanted.