Red Gorilla tracks time via the Web, calculates expenses--even prods the payables department. Oh, yeah. It's also free.

JOHN WITCHEL has a soft spot for traffic jams on the Golden Gate Bridge--during a particularly nasty one he thought up his latest company. As a USWeb/CKS consultant, he'd spent weeks with a client outside of San Francisco and hours trying to get home. One night last March he was trying to recall the day's billable hours--a two-hour chunk here, a five-minute fragment there--wishing he could somehow log them en route before he lost count. He dialed his own work line and left a one-word message: "time-tracking."

Eight months later Witchel, 31, has a 15-person company called Red Gorilla, $6 million in early funding and a funky south-of-Market office in San Francisco (next to Matt's Autobody). The Red Gorilla site--which records billable hours and tallies expenses--launches Nov. 15.

Lawyers, the first target, can keep track of their time from courthouse or car, over phone, Palm or a plain old PC. But the market is potentially huge. Some 28 million white-collar workers--including architects, therapists, accountants--bill by the hour or the minute.

It's free, like hundreds of other nichey on-line applications. But Witchel knows full well lavish funding for an e-concept without a clear profit map is a thing of the past. (He founded a Web consulting company, XCom, and sold it in 1996.) So Witchel and cofounder Ariel Kleckner (a fellow USWeb alum) have loaded up redgorilla.com with add-on services, like mobile access for $10 a month, and hard invoices and mailings for $5 each. Two additional sources of potential income: advertising and revenue-splitting deals with sites like the legal portal Cal Law. The goal is 10,000 users in the first month and a few hundred thousand by this time next year.

Not so fast. Red Gorilla doesn't yet own the forest. In fact, the company name ("red" because Witchel was on Stanford's Cardinal swim team) is a jab at "800-pound" applications like Sage's Time-slips software, used by 40% of law firms. So Witchel is targeting firms with 20 employees or less. In October Intuit announced a small-business Web gateway to handle tasks like supplies and mailings via third parties; Chairman Scott Cook says a company like Red Gorilla would make "an ideal addition."

Assuming it isn't outmuscled by a bigger animal, Red Gorilla faces the inevitable security question. Lawyers, used to keeping billing records in private and not being able to find them when they're sought by prosecutors, may balk at posting them on the Web--even with fire-wall and authentication protections. So Witchel is adding a virtual "nuke button" that instantly deletes all traces of a sensitive client's billing records by scrubbing the hard drive.