How to keep track of flextime hours when you set your own schedule

26 September 2026 · 6 min read

Flextime runs on a simple ledger: the hours you are contracted for, the hours you actually worked each day, and a running balance of time banked or owed. The ledger is easy. The hard part is the daily number, because a flexible day has no fixed start or end to remember. On a Mac-based job, you can take that number from a record of your day instead of your memory, then spend two minutes a week keeping the balance.

How a flextime balance works

Your employer’s policy sets the rules, so read it first. It usually covers:

• Contracted hours per week, and sometimes per day.
• Core hours, the window when you are expected to be available.
• Carryover limits, how much banked time you may keep from one period to the next.
• Whether a negative balance is allowed, and how quickly you must make it up.

The math is plain subtraction. If you are contracted for 40 hours and worked 8.5, 7, 9, 8 and 8.5, the week is 41 hours and the balance goes up by one. Next week, a short Friday uses it.

Why the balance drifts

Most flextime balances go wrong in the same few ways:

• Rounding. “About eight” every day hides the half hours in both directions.
• Uneven memory. It is easy to remember the afternoon you left early and forget the four evenings you finished one more message at seven.
• Split days. A school run in the middle of the day turns one workday into two shifts, and people tend to count only the first. Working in two shifts around kids covers counting a split day properly.

The fix for all three is the same: write down a real number every day, from a source other than your recollection.

A running balance in Numbers

A spreadsheet with five columns is enough.

1. In Numbers, create columns: Date, Worked, Contracted, Difference, Balance.
2. Enter hours as decimals. 7 hours 45 minutes is 7.75; 8 hours 20 minutes is about 8.33.
3. In the Difference column, subtract Contracted from Worked. For row 2, that is =B2-C2.
4. In the Balance column, add today’s difference to yesterday’s balance. For row 3, that is =E2+D3. Put your starting balance, often zero, in the first row.
5. Fill the formulas down as the weeks go on.

If your contract is weekly rather than daily, put the contracted hours on Fridays only and leave the other days at zero. The balance will look strange midweek and correct itself on Friday.

Where the daily number comes from

You can take the daily figure from memory, from your calendar, or from a record of what your Mac actually did.

Punchcard is a Mac menu bar app that notices which app is in front during your day, by app name only, and prints a receipt at the closing time you set. The receipt lists your top five apps with time per line, the rest as MISC, and a day total. Leaving the desk stops the count, so the total reflects time you were working at the Mac rather than time the Mac happened to be on. It needs no macOS permissions to do this.

For flextime, the day total is the number you want. Copy it into the Worked column. If your Mac was asleep at the closing time, the receipt prints when you are back, headed SORRY WE MISSED YOU, and still covers the whole day.

On a split day, the CSV export is useful. It has one row per session with a start and end time, so you can see when you started, when you stopped for the school run, and when you came back.

The limits matter for flextime:

• Time away from the Mac is not in the total. A meeting in a room, a call on your phone or a site visit needs adding by hand.
• It is your record, not your employer’s. Punchcard has no team features or integrations and reports to nobody. If your workplace has an official timesheet, that is what counts; the receipt helps you fill it in accurately.
• It does not separate work from personal use. If you check the news at your desk, that time sits on the receipt too. Read the lines, not just the total.

A weekly check that keeps it honest

On Sunday, Punchcard prints a week roll: the whole week on one receipt. Compare its total with the sum of your Worked column for the same week. If they differ by more than a meeting or two, one of the days was entered wrong, and the daily receipts will show which.

Once a month, look at the balance itself. A balance that only ever grows means you are working more than your contract and never taking the time back. A balance that keeps drifting negative means the schedule is not fitting your life, and it is better to raise that early than at the end of the period.

When the balance says take the time

Banked flextime only has value if you use it. When the balance reaches a round number, such as four hours, book the short afternoon before it disappears into the next busy week. How to use a daily total to set a weekly limit covers using the same numbers to stop the week from growing in the first place.

Questions

Does time at the Mac equal hours worked? Close, for a desk job, but not exactly. It misses work away from the Mac and includes any personal browsing at your desk. Use it as the starting figure and adjust.

Can Punchcard send my hours to my employer’s timesheet? No. It has no integrations or team features, and your data stays on your Mac. Copy the number yourself.

What if I forget to update the spreadsheet for a few days? Past days stay in Punchcard, and the CSV export has every session, so you can fill the gap from the record rather than from memory.