Features

Working Hours 4b is a work-time tracker for people who are paid by the hour: shift workers, part-timers, contractors, and anyone juggling more than one job. This page describes what it actually does, in the order you are likely to meet it. Where a feature is limited to a paid tier, that is stated.

The problem it solves

Most people who are paid by the hour keep two records that never quite agree: whatever the employer's system says, and a private note somewhere — a paper diary, a phone note, a spreadsheet that gets abandoned in March. When the payslip arrives, reconciling the two is guesswork. Was that Saturday paid at the higher rate? Did the twenty minutes of handover after every shift ever get counted? How many hours are sitting in the hour bank?

Working Hours 4b exists to make your own record the reliable one. It is built around three ideas that most generic time-tracking tools get wrong for hourly work:

• A day is not one block of time. A real working day often has an early start before the shift officially begins, a normal interval, an unpaid break in the middle, and overtime at the end. Each of those can be paid differently, so the app models them separately instead of storing a single start and end time.
• Hours are only half the answer. If you are paid hourly, an hour count that is not attached to a rate does not tell you whether you were paid correctly. Rates, bonuses and deductions belong in the same record as the hours.
• Not every day is a working day. Holidays, sick leave, unpaid absence and travel days all affect a month's totals, and a tracker that can only record "worked / did not work" cannot produce a useful monthly summary.

How it works in practice

1. Set up a job. Give it a name, an hourly rate and a colour. If you work for more than one employer, create one job per employer — every entry you make later is tagged with the job it belongs to.
2. Create a working profile for your usual shift. If you normally work 08:00–17:00 with an hour of unpaid break, save that once. From then on, filling in a normal day takes a single tap rather than four fields.
3. Record days as they happen. Tap a date on the calendar and apply a profile, or enter the times by hand when the day was unusual. Add the overtime separately so it keeps its own rate.
4. Check the month before payday. The statistics view totals normal hours, extra hours and earnings for the month or the year, per job or across all of them. That is the number to compare against your payslip.

The calendar

The calendar is the main screen and the only place data is entered. A month is shown as a grid; each day carries small coloured marks summarising what is recorded on it, so a glance tells you which days are worked, which are holidays, and which are still empty. Days belonging to different jobs get different colours, which matters more than it sounds when you are working two rotas at once.

Tapping a day opens its detail view, where you add or edit the events on it. A single day can hold more than one event — two shifts for two employers, a half day of work plus a half day of leave, a working day with a note attached.

Working intervals: the part most trackers get wrong

A working event is not stored as a single start-to-end block. It is made of up to four parts, each of which can carry its own pay:

The app enforces the obvious ordering rules — early entry cannot start after the normal interval, a pause has to sit inside it, overtime has to come after it — so the record stays internally consistent. The practical benefit is that your monthly total separates contractual hours from everything else, which is exactly the split a payslip should show.

Jobs and hourly rates

A job holds a name, an address, a note, a colour and an hourly cost. Every event you record is attached to a job, which is how the app can total hours and earnings per employer as well as across all of them. Statistics can be filtered to one job, to unassigned entries, or to everything at once.

Tracking more than one job at a time requires a Premium subscription. The free tier tracks a single job.

Working profiles

A working profile is a saved shift template — start, end, break, rates. Once you have defined "early shift" and "late shift", filling in a rota becomes a matter of applying a profile to each day instead of typing four times per day. Profiles are also what make a rotating pattern bearable to enter; there is more on that in the shift work guide.

Absences, holidays and other non-working days

Alongside working events, a day can carry:

• Holiday — booked annual leave.
• Work absence — sick leave, unpaid absence, and other time away.
• Travel — days spent travelling for work rather than at the workplace.
• Note — free text pinned to a date, for anything that does not fit the other categories but that you will want to remember when checking a payslip.
• Voucher — meal vouchers or similar per-day entitlements.
• Contribution — a fixed amount added to or deducted from a day.

These matter because a month's summary is only trustworthy if the non-working days are in it too. See tracking time off.

The hour bank

Many employers operate some form of time banking: extra hours are not paid immediately but accumulate as a balance you later draw down as time off. The app models this directly. You can enable an hour bank, set whether hours are added automatically, choose whether only extra hours count towards it, and give banked time an hourly value so the balance can be expressed in money as well as in hours.

The hour bank guide explains how to keep the balance honest.

Statistics

The statistics view aggregates what you have entered, by month and by year. It reports total hours split into normal and extra time, earnings, averages per working day, and the breakdown per job. Charts sit alongside the numbers for the patterns that are easier to see than to read.

The intended workflow is simple: before payday, open the month, compare the total against the payslip, and investigate any gap on the calendar. The statistics guide covers what each figure means and the three mistakes that most often explain a discrepancy.

Payments

Recording hours tells you what you are owed. The payments view tracks what you have actually been paid, so the difference between the two is visible instead of implied. For anyone invoicing per hour, or paid irregularly, that difference is the number that matters.

Platforms and sync

Working Hours 4b runs on Android, iOS and the web. Cross-platform sync — using the same account and the same data on more than one device — is part of the Premium subscription. Family share is included too, so a subscription can cover more than one person in a household.

The app is translated into more than twenty languages — German, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Portuguese, Croatian, Hungarian, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, Ukrainian, Hindi and Chinese among them — and opening it from the site root takes you to your own language automatically.

Subscriptions

Current prices are shown on the pricing page inside the app, in your own currency. Subscriptions are monthly or yearly; the refund policy applies.

What it does not do

Being clear about the boundaries saves everyone time:

• It is not a payroll system. It does not calculate tax, social contributions or net pay, and it does not file anything with anyone.
• It does not give legal advice. Working-time rules differ by country and by contract; the app records what you tell it and does not enforce any jurisdiction's limits.
• It is not a team management tool. For tracking other people's hours, look at Enterprise 4b instead.
• It does not connect to your employer's clock-in system. The record it holds is yours.