Meet TimeSpace — Daycare time-space % tracker

Finance

TimeSpace

Daycare time-space % tracker

What TimeSpace does

The Time-Space Percentage is the most important number on a family child care provider's tax return. It scales every home deduction on Form 8829 — and every hour you fail to record shrinks it. TimeSpace is the offline tracker built to protect that number.

Here is the math the IRS lets you do. Every hour children are in your home counts. So does every hour you work on the business when they are not there: cleaning after pickup, planning menus, prepping activities, keeping records. Divide those hours by the 8,760 hours in a year, multiply by the share of your home used for the business, and that percentage turns thousands of dollars of ordinary household costs into legitimate deductions. Providers who track carefully land points higher than providers who estimate in April — and each point is real money.

Today, tracking it means a paper log, a spreadsheet, or a twelve-fifty-a-month food-program subscription. TimeSpace replaces all three with two one-tap timers: Kids Here and Working Alone. Tap when the first child arrives, tap when the last one leaves, tap again when you start the evening cleanup. Forgot to tap? Add hours by hand in seconds.

Space is a single walkthrough. Enter each room's square footage and mark it regularly used, exclusively used, or not used for the business. TimeSpace keeps your space percentage current and shows how each room moves it.

The hardest habit is logging work done after the children leave, and the widely taught rule is to track it closely for at least two months and apply the average all year. TimeSpace turns that rule into a plan: pick your sampling window, get a gentle evening reminder, and watch a progress ring fill as your average firms up.

Come tax season, a shared-expense ledger applies your percentage to utilities, insurance, and repairs automatically, and a year-end packet lays out hours, square footage, and scaled expenses the way Form 8829 asks for them — ready to hand to your tax preparer. Everything stays on your device. No account, no subscription, nothing wrapped around it.

• One-tap Kids Here and Working Alone timers with manual entry • Room-by-room square-footage walkthrough with exclusive-use rooms • Live Time-Space Percentage that updates with every logged hour • Two-month sampling plan with evening reminders and progress ring • Shared-expense ledger auto-scaled by your percentage • Form 8829-ready year-end packet for your tax preparer • Fully offline, private, no account required

A look inside

Tap any screenshot to open the full-resolution version.

What's inside

• Hour Timers — Two one-tap timers — Kids Here and Working Alone — stamp child-present hours and after-hours business work (cleaning, menu planning, records) into a daily log, with quick manual entry for forgotten sessions.
• Space Walkthrough — A guided room-by-room inventory: enter each room's square footage and mark it regularly used, exclusively used, or not used for the business. Exclusive-use rooms count at 100% per IRS rules, and the space percentage updates live as rooms change.
• Time-Space Dashboard — The headline number: your live Time-Space Percentage with its time and space components broken out, hours-to-date against the 8,760-hour year, and a what-if strip showing how one more weekly after-hours hour moves the percentage.
• Sampling Plan — Implements the two-month tracking rule taught by Copeland and CCR&R trainers: pick a sampling window, get an evening reminder to log after-hours work, and watch a progress ring confirm when your window is complete and your average is defensible.
• Shared-Expense Ledger — Log utilities, insurance, repairs, and supplies; shared expenses are automatically scaled by your current Time-Space Percentage while direct business expenses count in full, so the deductible total is always current.
• Year-End Packet — A Form 8829-ready summary — total child-present hours, after-hours business hours, time percent, space percent by room, and scaled expense totals — exported as a clean PDF for the tax preparer.

Why we built it

The Time-Space Percentage scales every home deduction a family child care provider takes, and maximizing it requires logging business hours when children are NOT present plus a room-by-room square-footage inventory — yet the canonical tools are a manual spreadsheet or a $12.50/mo web subscription. Providers forget the…

What makes it different

KidKare Accounting is the only software that tracks hours when children aren't present, and it costs $12.50/mo, lives on the web, and buries hour tracking inside a food-program platform; Tom Copeland's canonical alternative is a manual Excel spreadsheet with no timers, reminders, or sampling helper; generic time track…

Who it's for

Freelancers, contractors, and small-business owners who want their numbers right at tax time without renting a SaaS to do it.

In one line: Daycare time-space % tracker

Try it

See the Daycare time-space % tracker for the full feature list, the info table, and support links.

Use TimeSpace, found a bug, or have a feature request? Comments are open below — anonymous is fine.