Backlsh is an intelligent automatic time tracking platform that runs silently in the background, logging every app, website and document activity without any manual input. Built for freelancers and distributed teams who want accurate billing and productivity insight without the cognitive overhead of a running timer.
Freelancers and distributed teams lose thousands of billable hours every year to manual time logging. Existing tools demand constant user input, producing inaccurate logs and undercharged invoices. Backlsh needed to capture every second automatically at the OS level, intelligently categorise work sessions, and surface clean insights without adding a single second of friction to the user's day.
Passive Time Tracking, Live
Every app, website and document captured automatically — no timers, no manual input, no lost billable hours. Everything you worked on, just there.
How We Built It
A focused, deliberate process — from discovery to deployment.
OS Integration Research
Mapped macOS and Windows event APIs to find the most reliable hooks for tracking active application focus, idle detection and document-level activity — without elevated permissions or measurable impact on system performance.
Silent Background Agent
Built an Electron process with near-zero memory footprint that hooks into OS-level events, batches activity data locally and syncs to the backend asynchronously — completely invisible during the user's entire work session.
Smart Categorisation Engine
Developed a rule-based + lightweight ML classifier that automatically categorises apps, browser domains and documents into billable project buckets, learning from user corrections to improve accuracy over time.
Analytics Dashboard & Export
Built a React-powered reporting dashboard with daily/weekly/monthly breakdowns, project attribution, team productivity heatmaps and one-click export to CSV and QuickBooks/FreshBooks formats.
Numbers That Matter
Real impact, measured and validated.
Inside the App
Key dashboards and tracking views from the live Backlsh product.
What Powered It
Every tool chosen deliberately for the problem at hand.
Backlsh basically pays for itself in recovered billable time within the first week. I used to spend an hour every Friday reconstructing my week from memory — now it's all just there.