PUNCHCARD Get Punchcard $9

Export your time data to CSV and keep it forever

· 6 min read

Export to CSV because a CSV outlives every app that ever wrote one. It opens in Numbers, Excel, a text editor and a Terminal, and it will still open in whatever you are using in twenty years. Here is how to get your time data out, how to store it so it survives, and how to read it again later.

Why CSV and not the app’s own format

Time data is only valuable over long stretches. A day’s total is trivia; a year of days is a record of how you actually worked, and five years is the kind of thing you wish you had when quoting a job, negotiating hours or just remembering what a good month looked like.

Most tracking tools keep that record in a format only they can read, on a server only they control. If the tool changes hands, changes price or shuts down, the record goes with it. A CSV is the opposite: plain text, one row per line, commas between values, readable by anything. It is the least glamorous file format and the most durable one.

Two rules follow. Export regularly, not once. And store the export somewhere the tool does not own.

Exporting from Punchcard

Punchcard keeps your data on the Mac and makes it easy to take out.

  1. Click the Punchcard icon in the menu bar.
  2. Choose Export CSV.
  3. Pick a folder and a name. A name that sorts well is worth a second of thought: punchcard-2026-08.csv lines up in Finder by year and month; export.csv does not.
  4. Open the file once to check it. Double-clicking opens it in Numbers on most Macs; Quick Look (select it and press the space bar) shows it without opening anything.

The export contains the data the receipts are printed from: app names and time, by day. Be clear about what it does not contain, because the absence is the point. There are no window titles, document names, URLs or keystrokes in the file, because Punchcard never records them. There are no projects, clients or rates, because it has none. If you need hours per client in a spreadsheet, this file will not give you that; a per-project tracker will, at the cost of you telling it which project every time.

A folder structure that survives

The file is durable; the question is whether you will be able to find it.

  • One folder, named plainly: Time logs inside Documents.
  • One file per month, named by year and month, exported at the end of each month. Twelve files a year.
  • Keep the receipts alongside if you save them. Punchcard exports each receipt as a 1080 by 1350 PNG; a Receipts subfolder by year holds them.
  • Let the folder ride on whatever backup you already have. If Documents is in iCloud Drive, it is covered. If you use Time Machine, it is covered. If neither, this is a good reason to turn one of them on.

Avoid anything cleverer than this. A database, a custom naming scheme, a tagging system: each is one more thing that has to still make sense to you in a decade. Year, month, a plain name.

Opening it later

A CSV is only as useful as your ability to ask it questions. Three ways, in order of effort.

  • Numbers or Excel. Open the file, select the table, and create a pivot table (Numbers: Organize > Create Pivot Table; Excel: Insert > PivotTable). Put the app in rows, the day in columns, the time as the value. You now have the month as a grid.
  • A text editor. Open the file and search. “Mail” finds every day with mail time. This is crude and often all you need.
  • The Terminal. grep Xcode punchcard-2026-08.csv pulls every row for one app; wc -l counts rows. Nothing to install.

If you want the view that matters most, the month in one glance, month-in-review-what-a-month-roll-shows-you.html explains what the printed month roll already shows, which may save you the spreadsheet entirely.

The raw database as a second copy

CSV is the portable copy. Punchcard also keeps its whole record in one SQLite file:

~/Library/Application Support/Punchcard/punchcard.sqlite

To reach it, open Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder, and paste the path to the folder. Copying that file is a complete backup of everything the app knows. Quit Punchcard first so the copy is not taken mid-write, and keep the copy next to the CSVs.

You can open it directly in the Terminal with sqlite3, which ships with macOS, if you ever want to query it. Most people never will, and the CSV is enough. The file is there so that nothing about your record depends on the app still existing.

For where other apps keep their records and how to find them, where-mac-apps-keep-your-data-and-how-to-find-it.html walks through the usual locations.

Starting over

The other half of keeping data forever is being able to not keep it. Burn the roll, in Punchcard, deletes everything the app has recorded. Export first if you want the history; burn if you want a clean start. Either way the decision is yours, made on your Mac, with no account to close and nothing to request from anyone.

Questions

How often should I export?

Monthly is enough for most people, done on the first of the month for the month before. The week roll on Sunday covers the short view, and the CSV covers the long one. If you would be upset to lose a week, export weekly.

Will the CSV open in Excel on Windows?

Yes. CSV is plain text and every spreadsheet application reads it. If dates or times look odd, that is the spreadsheet guessing a format; choose the import option that treats columns as text and it will behave.

Can I import the CSV into another time tracker?

Usually, if that tracker imports CSV at all, though you may need to rename columns to match what it expects. Punchcard itself has no integrations and does not import; the export is there so the data is yours, not so it can be moved between tools automatically.