Kimai Hosting

How Kimai works

Kimai organises time entries around customers, projects, activities, users, and configurable rates. A person can run a timer or enter work manually, while managers review the resulting records by period, client, project, activity, or team member. The same structured data can support internal utilisation reviews, customer billing preparation, and export to another accounting process.

Permissions separate ordinary users, team leads, and administrators. Teams can restrict access to selected customers and projects, while configurable fields and tags add context that a basic start-and-stop timer cannot capture. Reports summarise recorded work without requiring a separate spreadsheet for every client or department.

Key Kimai features

Timesheets retain duration, dates, descriptions, projects, activities, and rates in one searchable history. Reporting views help compare billable and non-billable work, identify missing entries, and prepare a period for approval. Invoice documents can be generated from selected records, although the hosted application does not send them by email.

Kimai also supports teams, roles, budgets, exports, and an extension ecosystem. Some advanced functions are delivered through optional plugins rather than the core image, so administrators should verify a required workflow before promising it to users. The page therefore focuses on the upstream core time-tracking and reporting model.

Kimai vs Toggl Track

Kimai is a self-hosted time-recording application centred on customers, projects, activities, rates, reports, and invoice preparation. Toggl Track is a vendor-operated service with web, desktop, mobile, browser-extension, reporting, project, and team-management features maintained by the provider.

Toggl Track may suit organisations that want official clients, managed infrastructure, and a broader subscription service without operating their own installation. Kimai is attractive when the priority is controlling timesheet data, account administration, and the application environment while retaining a business-oriented project structure.

Who uses Kimai

Consultancies use Kimai to connect employee time with customer work. Freelancers can prepare billable records and exports, while internal departments use it for project costing, capacity review, or grant reporting. Teams that already have accounting software can keep Kimai as the detailed time source and transfer approved totals downstream.

The application is not a payroll engine or a complete accounting suite. A successful rollout still needs clear rules for activities, rates, corrections, approvals, and invoice ownership. Those operating decisions have more effect on reporting quality than adding more fields after inconsistent data has accumulated.

Self-hosting Kimai: requirements and cost

Usage grows with active timers, users, customers, projects, reports, exports, generated documents, and retained timesheet history. MariaDB stores accounts, permissions, time entries, rates, and configuration. AvaHost provisions that database with Kimai, but MariaDB is unmanaged and its memory is not included in the exported application minimum.

The database-adjusted recommendation is Plan 2 at €5. The service includes one-click deployment, a custom HTTPS domain, automatic application updates, and scheduled backups. Application email is disabled, so Kimai cannot mail invoices, invitations, alerts, or password-recovery messages from this installation; generated files can still be downloaded and handled through an external business process.