Clockify is the time tracker most small agencies start on, for a good reason: it is free for a team of up to five, the timer works everywhere, and it does not get in the way. We started on it too. This post is about the point at which a VA agency outgrows it, what we built instead, and, so you can decide honestly, the things Clockify still does that ours does not.
Prices below are from Clockify’s pricing page as of September 2026, per seat per month, billed annually; the monthly rate is a dollar or two higher on each plan.
What Clockify gets right
The free plan is real. Unlimited tracking, timesheet and calendar views, desktop and mobile apps, a Pomodoro timer, idle detection, integrations and reports, for up to five users, for nothing. For a freelancer or a three-person team with no billing complexity, that is the whole product and there is no reason to pay anyone.
The paid ladder is cheap and sensible. Basic at $3.99 adds admin controls, Standard at $5.49 adds invoicing, Pro at $7.99 adds screenshots, GPS and scheduling, Enterprise at $11.99 adds the security and audit layer. Ten VAs on Pro is about $80 a month. Nobody goes out of business on that.
And it has the two things we do not: native mobile apps, and an idle detection that stops the clock when a person walks away.
Where it stops fitting a VA agency
An agency that bills clients for VA hours has a workflow that Clockify supports piece by piece and never as one thing. The hours are tracked. The invoice is on a different plan and built by picking entries from a report. The proof that the work happened, the screenshots, is on a higher plan again. The instructions the VA was supposed to follow live in a Google Doc nobody can prove was opened. Each piece works. The join between them is a person with two browser tabs, and that person is usually the owner.
Three specific gaps, from running an agency on it:
Billing the same hour twice, or not at all. When invoices are assembled from a report, nothing in the system knows which entries have already been billed. You filter by date range and trust that last month’s range ended where this month’s begins. It does, until a VA back-dates an entry into a closed month.
Screenshots as an add-on rather than a default. Evidence of work is the thing a client asks about when an invoice surprises them. Having it start at $7.99 per seat is fine; having it be a plan decision rather than a default means small agencies skip it and regret it in the one month it mattered.
No place for the SOPs. A VA agency is its procedures. Clockify tracks time against projects; it has no idea whether the person who logged four hours on “returns processing” ever read the returns procedure. That is not a criticism of a time tracker. It is the reason a time tracker is not enough.
What we built
Tarly is the portal our own VAs clock into, built for exactly one shape of business: an agency billing clients for hours. It is not a general time tracker and it is not trying to be. The parts that matter against Clockify:
An invoice is built from unbilled time, and the entries are stamped. When you raise an invoice for a client, Tarly shows the hours that have never been billed, and the moment the invoice exists, each entry carries its invoice number. An hour cannot appear on two invoices, and “what have we not billed yet” is a query, not a spreadsheet reconciliation.
Screenshots and activity are part of the timer, not a plan. Captured from the browser at an interval the organisation sets, five minutes to an hour, on or off per member, stored privately and served only to a signed-in admin. There is no silent mode and no URL or application tracking, on purpose; a VA sees the same thing the admin sees.
A knowledge base with receipts. Procedures live inside the portal, can be marked required reading, and record who opened them and for how long. When a client asks whether the person on their account has read the brand guide, the answer is a timestamp.
One login. Time, screenshots, tasks, clients, invoices, the knowledge base, Slack and the API in the same place, so a new VA learns one thing in one session.
An assistant that acts, with undo. “Log two hours for Rera yesterday”, “draft this month’s invoice for Driftwood”, “who is working right now”. Every change it makes records its own reversal first, so a wrong instruction is one click to take back.
What Clockify does that Tarly does not
This is the part that decides it, so it goes in plain sight. Tarly has no native mobile apps; it is a responsive web app, and a VA who works from a phone will prefer Clockify. Tarly does not pause the timer when someone goes idle; it shows the idle bands and leaves the clock running, which is on our list to change and is not changed yet. Tarly has two integrations, Slack and a REST API, against Clockify’s eighty-odd. It has no GPS, no scheduling, no expenses, no time off, and no payments on invoices. If any of those is in your daily work, Clockify Pro is the better tool and cheaper than the alternatives.
Tarly also has no public price. It is what our own agency runs on, offered to the clients we work with and to other agencies by arrangement, which is a different kind of product from a card-and-go SaaS. That is honest to say up front.
How to decide
Stay on Clockify if you are under five people, bill by the project rather than the hour, or need the mobile apps. Move when you notice the owner doing the join by hand: assembling invoices from reports, chasing screenshots for a disputed month, asking in Slack whether anyone read the procedure. Those are the three jobs Tarly exists to remove.
You can see it without signing up for anything: the demo opens a seeded workspace for an hour, no account, no card. If it fits, ask for access.
