Billing your clients for your time

Time tracking answers one question — what do we invoice this client for this month? — and it answers it without anybody re-typing a timesheet into an invoice.

Log the time

Time & billing → Timesheet. Pick the project, say how long, say what you did.

Durations are read the way you would write them: 1:30, 90m, 1h 30 and 2h all mean the same thing. A bare number is minutes — 45 is three quarters of an hour, not forty-five of them.

Uncheck Billable for internal work. It still appears in your reports, so you can see where the week actually went; it simply never reaches an invoice.

Set what an hour is worth

Rates. The most specific rate wins:

a task rate beats a project rate beats a client rate beats your default

So set one default and you are working. Add a client rate when one client is on different terms, and a task rate when one kind of work is.

Rates apply to work done on or after their start date. That means raising your rate never re-prices work you have already done — last month stays at last month's rate, which is what your client was shown.

A fixed price for a whole job

Choose Fixed price for the whole job instead of an hourly rate, and set it on the task. It is invoiced once, however many hours go into it. The hours are still recorded, so you can see afterwards what the job really cost you — which is the number that tells you whether to quote differently next time.

Hours with no rate

Work with no rate is shown as Unpriced, and it is not invoiced. Nothing is lost: set a rate and it is picked up on the next invoice. It is never billed at zero, because that would take it out of the pool for good.

Turn it into an invoice

Billing shows what each client owes for work you have logged and not yet invoiced. Press Create draft invoice and it becomes a draft in your invoicing suite — a draft, not a sent invoice. Review it, edit it, add anything else it needs, and send it when you are ready.

Or have it happen without you

Set it once per client, or set one default that covers everybody you have not named:

Days run from 1 to 28. The 29th, 30th and 31st do not exist in every month, so a schedule set to the 31st would quietly skip February and four other months — for "the end of the month", use 28.

What has been billed, and what has not

History lists every invoice raised from your logged time, with the period it covers, the hours and the money. Reports breaks a period down by person, by client and by project, and keeps three things apart that are easy to confuse:

• Invoiced — billed and on a document.
• Not yet invoiced — billable work you have not charged for yet. This is the number to

watch.

• Internal — work you decided not to charge for.

Things that cannot go wrong

An hour is invoiced once. Pressing Create draft invoice twice does not produce a second invoice, and neither does a schedule firing while you are already billing that client by hand.

If you void a draft, the hours it covered come straight back to the outstanding pool and can be invoiced again — nothing is stranded.

And once time has been invoiced you cannot edit or delete it, because your client is holding a document that says otherwise. Void the draft, change the entry, and bill it again.