For solicitors and barristers
The fee note you write from a record, not from memory.
For sole practitioners, the self-employed Bar and small firms without a practice system to do it for you. Quarter Past asks what you’ve been doing, as often as every five minutes, and one tap logs the time that just passed against the matter.
For Mac · 14 days free, then £54 once · Never reads your screen
Six o’clock, and the day has to be reconstructed.
Three matters, two calls, one letter that turned into four, and the units written up at the end from a diary, an inbox and a guess. Recorded time that is reconstructed is recorded low.
You open the lease.
Tap the matter, or don’t. Either way the record is about to be kept.
It asks.
A small card by the menu bar: what have you been doing? Your matters are the choices. One tap records 09:00 to 09:10 against the lease.
The client calls about something else.
You take the call. When it next asks, you tap the other matter, and the call is logged from the last answer. Nothing was reconstructed.
The units are already there.
Every entry to the minute, by matter and activity, with a note, and marked whether it was measured live or added afterwards. Export it to the fee note or the ledger.
Set it to your units. Export it to your system.
Quarter Past is the record. It is not a practice management system and does not try to be one.
- Matters
- A project per matter. Tasks under each for the activities you record separately: attendance, drafting, correspondence, research, travel.
- Interval
- Every 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 or 60 minutes. Ten minutes suits most fee earners; five if you record in six-minute units and want nothing rounded away.
- To the minute
- Entries are real intervals on the clock, 09:00 to 09:10, not estimates. The export gives decimal hours, so rounding to your units is your call at billing, not the app’s.
- Chargeable
- A billable tick on every entry. Untick the practice admin and the CPD.
- Notes
- A line on any entry: “attendance on client re completion date” is there when the narrative is written, not remembered a month later.
- Export
- A CSV of every entry: date, matter, activity, note, start, end, duration in decimal hours, billable, and how it was captured. Opens in Excel, or imports into whatever raises the bill.
- Corrections
- Change a start time, add the hearing you were at all morning, split a block, undo a delete. An honest record is one you are allowed to fix.
It never reads the screen. On a matter, that is the point.
Automatic trackers work by watching: document titles, web addresses, which window was open when. On privileged work that is a second record of the matter, kept by software, often on somebody else’s server. Quarter Past has no screen-recording or accessibility permissions. It knows the name of the matter you tapped and the note you typed, and nothing else.
No account, no server, no sync
The record is a file on your own Mac. Nothing is transmitted anywhere, and it works in chambers, in court and on the train.
Yours to keep, export and destroy
Readable and exportable whatever happens to the app or the licence. Delete it and it is gone.
Honest about its own gaps
Every entry says whether it was measured live or recalled. If a bill is ever questioned, the record says how it was made.
What it is not
Not a practice management system: no client account, no ledger, no conflict search, no compliance module. Not a firm-wide timesheet: one person, one Mac. It is the personal record that those systems assume you already have, and that most people are writing up at six.
Less than one unrecorded unit a week.
£54, paid once, for one Mac. Fourteen days free first, with no card and no account. Not a subscription, and an expired licence never locks you out of your own record.
Version 2.3.10 · 7 MB · macOS 10.15 or later, Apple silicon and Intel · Checked by Apple