How to track continuing education hours you complete on a Mac

28 September 2026 · 6 min read

For accredited courses, the provider’s certificate is your record, so the job is keeping every certificate in one place you can find at renewal time. The harder part is everything else: webinars that never sent a certificate, self-study, journal reading, recorded sessions you watched in three sittings. For those you need your own log with a date, an activity and a duration, and your Mac can keep the duration part for you.

What a licensing body usually wants

Rules differ by profession, by state and sometimes by license type, so read your own board’s requirements before building anything. Most of them share a shape:

A number of hours per renewal period, sometimes with a minimum in particular subjects such as ethics.
Categories with limits. Self-study or independent learning is often capped, while live or accredited courses count in full.
A definition of an hour. Some bodies count a credit hour as fewer than sixty minutes of instruction. Check yours before you total anything.
Proof kept for a set number of years, so you can produce it if your renewal is ever audited.

That last point is the reason to keep a log at all. Nobody remembers in year three what they studied in year one, and an audit request is not the time to start reconstructing.

Keep the certificates in one folder first

Before tracking anything, give certificates a home. In Finder, make a folder called “Continuing education” in Documents, with one folder inside it for each renewal period. Save every certificate there the day you get it, named with the date first so it sorts itself: “2026-09-14 Ethics webinar.pdf”.

If a certificate only exists as a web page, open it in your browser and choose File, Print, then use the PDF menu in the print dialog and choose Save as PDF. Keep a copy of the whole folder somewhere other than this Mac, such as a backup drive, because the proof is the whole point.

A log for the hours without certificates

For everything that does not come with a certificate, keep a simple spreadsheet in Numbers or any spreadsheet app. One row per session, with these columns:

Date
Activity: the course, article, book chapter or recording.
Source: the provider, journal or organization.
Format: live, recorded, reading, conference.
Minutes
Category: whatever categories your board uses.
Notes: a line on what you took from it. Some boards ask for a short reflection; even if yours does not, it helps you remember the session was real.

The date, activity and notes are easy to write down. Minutes are the column people guess, and guesses drift toward round numbers.

Letting the Mac record the durations

Punchcard is a Mac menu bar app that notices which app is in front during your day, by name only, and prints a receipt at the closing time you set: your top five apps with the time on each, the rest as MISC, and a day total. There are no timers to remember, which matters for learning that happens in odd corners of the week.

How continuing education shows up:

A live webinar in a video call app prints as that app’s line.
A journal article read as a PDF in Preview prints as Preview.
A recorded course in a browser prints as the browser. If you switch on “Itemize websites” in Settings, time in Chrome, Brave, Edge or Vivaldi prints as the sites you used instead, so the course platform gets its own line. Safari time stays one line, because Safari’s scripting cannot tell a Private window from a normal one; why website time tracking skips Safari explains the details.

The receipt shows the top five lines of each day. For exact minutes, use the CSV export, which has one row per session with a start time, an end time, the app, the seconds, and the site when itemized browsing is on. To total a course you watched over three evenings, filter the CSV for the course site and add up the seconds. Export your time data to CSV and keep it forever covers opening it in a spreadsheet, and reading your own time data with sqlite3 in the Terminal covers querying the file directly.

What an automatic record cannot prove

Be clear with yourself about what this record is.

Time in front is not attention. Punchcard knows the course site was the front tab for forty minutes. It does not know whether you were listening.
It does not know which course. It keeps site names only, never full addresses, paths or page titles. If a platform hosts every course you take, all of them share one line. Your notes say which was which.
It sees nothing away from the Mac. An in-person conference, a workshop or a printed journal is not on the receipt. Add those by hand.
It is your record, not the board’s. A receipt does not replace a certificate of completion, attendance verification or a quiz your board requires. Use it to write accurate minutes in your log, never to claim hours you did not do.

A routine that keeps the log current

After each session, save the certificate if there is one, or add a row to the log if there is not.
On Sunday, when Punchcard prints its week roll, glance at it and fill in any minutes you left blank from the CSV.
At the end of each month, total the log by category and compare it with what the renewal needs. The month roll is a natural reminder.
Before renewal, export the CSV for the whole period and save it in the same folder as the certificates, so the proof lives in one place.

This takes a few minutes a week, and it turns renewal from a scramble into copying totals onto a form.

Questions

Can Punchcard tell me which course I was taking? No. It keeps the site name only, such as the platform’s domain, and never the full address or page title. Your log’s activity column carries that detail.

Does it work while I study offline, on a flight for example? Yes. Tracking and printing work with no connection, and tracked data never leaves the Mac.

Is the CSV export free? Yes. Tracking never expires and the CSV export works without a license. The first two receipts are free; printing receipts after that needs a $9 one-time license for two Macs.