I have been an independent more or less my whole career and have used
various time tracking methods over the years.

My steady favorite for a long time was a custom Excel sheet.

Almost 3 years ago I decided to move to Washington DC (a larger
market) and grow the business beyond just me and it quickly became
apparent that Excel wasn't going to cut it for multiple people,
approving time, etc. So being a software company, we foolishly wrote
our own - well, actually we adopted some freebie code and heavily
customized it and turned it into a product. It serves our needs
really well as billable software development consultants but we are
having a tough time getting it into any vertical markets. (Our other
product, Secret Server, which has a huge security focus is doing far
better!)

* Do most people on this list sell their time?
* Do you give detailed descriptions down to the hour?
* Are you going through the same hassles that we did (buy vs build)?

Thanks,
Jonathan Cogley

If anyone is interested, our time entry system is called
MyClockWatcher (http://www.myclockwatcher.com)

Our other product is Secret Server which is a secure web-based
application to put your passwords and securely share them across your
team. (http://www.thesecretserver.com)