Leslie Bradshaw has worked in and around professional services her whole career — law firms, agencies, fractional strategy work. She knows how billing works. She’s good at her job and she runs her business like a business.
And still, she was leaving money on the table. She just didn’t know how much.
Leslie is a fractional strategy consultant (lesliebradshaw.com). When she started using Fract a few months ago, it wasn’t because she thought she had a billing problem. It was because she wanted to understand how she was actually spending her time.
“I feel really exhausted,” she told me, “and I feel like I’m not spending as much time as I want with my family. So I wanted to know: how many hours am I actually working?”
The answer surprised her. On days that felt like marathons, she’d look at the log and find six hours. Sometimes fewer. The mental load was real — but the clock hours were lower than she assumed.
That was useful to know. But it wasn’t the big discovery.
The bigger thing was what she found when she looked at what she was logging.
She had a client on a fixed-scope engagement — call it Jericho. The agreement was four hours a day. Clear scope, set hours. She’d invoice at the end of the month and everyone understood the deal.
Except she was doing more than four hours. Not because the work expanded dramatically, but because of all the things that don’t feel like work in the moment: checking Slack before bed, responding to a quick message during dinner, reviewing something that came in over the weekend.
“You want me to check Slack before I go to bed? That’s a tap. That’s a tap.”
Once you start logging those, they add up. A tap here, a tap there. She ran the numbers over two weeks. She was working four and a half, five hours a day on a four-hour engagement. Across ten working days, that’s a full extra day of unbilled time.
She took that data back to her client. Asked if there were more hours available. Had a real conversation about scope.
“It gave me the data I needed to create some more boundaries in my life and ask to be paid for time I would have otherwise just written off.”
This is the thing Fract is actually for.
It’s not about perfect time accounting. It’s about visibility. Most fractionals I’ve talked to are in exactly this position: they know roughly how much they’re working, they have a general sense of their capacity, but they don’t have a clear picture. The work bleeds into everything — into evenings, weekends, the gaps between other things — and it never feels like enough to log formally.
But 6 minutes is enough to log. A tap is enough to log. And those taps, over two weeks, tell you something real.
Leslie put it well: “You start seeing that you’re like — shit.”
That moment of clarity is what changes how you work. Not the logging itself — the seeing.
The 0.1-hour billing increment (six minutes) isn’t arbitrary. It’s the standard professional billing unit that law firms have used for decades. Lawyers learned a long time ago that unbilled time is lost money, and that tracking in small increments is the only honest way to capture what professional work actually costs.
Fractionals are doing the same kind of work — high-stakes, expertise-driven, hard to scope perfectly in advance. But most of them are billing on gut feel and rough estimates. They’re doing the work of professionals and accounting for it like it’s casual labor.
Fract is just the tool that makes the professional approach accessible without the overhead. One tap. No timers running. No accounts, no cloud, no subscription. Just a clear picture of where your time is actually going.
Leslie figured this out in about two weeks. She didn’t need a sophisticated time tracking system. She didn’t need to overhaul how she runs her business. She needed to see the numbers clearly enough to have an honest conversation with a client.
That conversation paid for itself.
If you’ve ever suspected you’re working more than you’re billing — or just want to know the real answer — Fract is free on the App Store.
Free. No account. iPhone only.