Every agency and consultancy loses money the same way. Not to bad debt, and not to clients who refuse to pay. To hours that were worked and never recorded, because recording them was a separate task that happened later, if at all.
Billing for time is really two problems. Capturing the hours honestly, and turning them into an invoice a client will pay without an argument.
Pick a rate model before you pick a tool
How you price the hours determines everything downstream, including what your timesheet needs to capture.
| Model | How it prices | Suits | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed price | One agreed amount for the project. Hours are recorded but do not change the total. | Well-scoped work with a clear deliverable | Scope creep. You still need the hours to know whether you made money. |
| One project rate | A single blended hourly rate for everyone on the project | Simple engagements, small teams | Senior time subsidising junior time, invisibly |
| Rate per task | Each task type has its own rate | Mixed disciplines: design at one rate, development at another | Arguments about which task something belongs to |
| Rate per person | Each team member has their own hourly rate | Professional services where seniority is the pricing dimension | Clients querying why a name they do not recognise appeared |
Fixed price is worth a note. People assume it means you can stop tracking time. The opposite is true: on a fixed price project, tracked hours are the only way to know your effective hourly rate, and therefore the only way to price the next one better.
The capture problem
The gap between doing work and recording it is where the money goes. A few things reliably close it.
Track as you go, not at the end
Reconstructing a week on Friday afternoon systematically under-reports. Nobody remembers the twenty minutes on a call, the interruption, the second round of revisions. Those add up to a meaningful fraction of a week.
Make starting the timer cost nothing
If starting a timer means navigating to a different screen, it will not happen during the work. It has to be available wherever you already are.
Record non-billable time too
This is counterintuitive and it is the single highest-value habit on this list. Internal work, rework, admin and pitching are all real costs. If your timesheet only holds billable hours, you know your revenue per hour and nothing about your margin. Every hour should be logged and flagged, not omitted.
Write descriptions the client will read
“Development” is not a description. “Fixed checkout validation reported 14 Aug” is. The quality of your time descriptions is the single biggest factor in whether a timesheet-backed invoice gets queried.
Turning hours into an invoice
How you present the hours matters as much as the total. There are four sensible layouts:
- One line for everything. “Consulting, August: 47.5 hours”. Clean, and it invites the question “doing what?”.
- A line per time log. Complete transparency and a four-page invoice. Right for clients who audit, exhausting for everyone else.
- A line per task. Usually the sweet spot. Enough detail to answer the obvious question, short enough to read.
- A task split by person. Necessary when different people bill at different rates, because the client needs to see how the total was arrived at.
A useful rule: the invoice should be detailed enough that a reasonable client would not need to ask a follow-up question, and no more detailed than that.
Rounding, minimums and the honesty question
Rounding to six-minute or fifteen-minute increments is standard in professional services. It is defensible when it is disclosed and applied consistently in both directions. It stops being defensible when every entry rounds up.
Whatever you choose, put it in the engagement letter. Rounding a client discovers on an invoice is a rounding policy you no longer have.
Getting the invoice paid
Time-based invoices get queried more than fixed-price ones, because there is more to query. Most of it is preventable.
- Bill on a rhythm. Monthly, on a predictable date. An invoice covering eleven weeks will be read line by line.
- Send while the work is remembered. An invoice for July that arrives in September is querying itself.
- Flag overruns before they land on an invoice. A budget that was exceeded three weeks ago is a conversation. On an invoice it is a dispute.
- Make paying trivial. A payment link on the invoice converts far better than bank details in a footer.
- State your terms in advance, including late fees. A late fee that appears for the first time on an overdue invoice reads as a penalty. One that was in the engagement letter reads as a policy.
How Invoice Crowd handles time
Time tracking in Invoice Crowd follows one path: hours are recorded against a project task, priced by the project’s billing method, and carried onto an invoice line when you bill them.
The timer sits in the app header as a stopwatch icon and is available on every page, so it can be started from the invoice editor or the dashboard without opening the timesheet first. Time can also be entered manually, either as a single entry with a date, project, task, member and a duration in hours and minutes, or through a weekly grid with a row per task.
All four rate models are supported per project: Fixed, Project Hours for one blended rate, Task Hours for a rate per task, and Member Hours for the rate on the assigned team member. The four invoice line layouts described above are set per project too.
Every log carries a billable flag, so non-billable hours are still recorded and still appear in the timesheet and the project’s time logs. Billing is a selection: choose the projects or the individual logs and Create Invoice builds the lines at the project’s rate, marks each log invoiced and links it to the invoice.
Two limits are worth reading in advance. Once a log has been invoiced it is locked, so edits and deletion are refused and a later conversion skips it, which protects the hours behind an invoice you have already sent. And deleting an unbilled log is permanent with no recycle bin.
One more boundary, stated plainly because it saves a wasted evaluation: this is not a project management tool. Tasks are flat records with a name, an hourly rate, an hour budget, a billable flag and a status. There are no subtasks, dependencies or due dates. Projects exist to price and bill work, not to plan it.
A weekly routine that works
- Daily. Start the timer, or log the entry before you close the tab.
- Friday. Review the week. Anything missing is easier to reconstruct now than at month end.
- Monthly. Check hours against budget per project, then bill. Query anything odd before it becomes an invoice line.
- Quarterly. Compare billable to total hours per person. That ratio, not your rate card, is what determines whether the business works.
Frequently asked questions
Should I track time on fixed-price projects?
Yes, and it is the case people most often skip. On a fixed-price project the hours do not change what the client pays, but they are the only way to know your effective hourly rate. Without them you cannot tell a profitable fixed price from a loss-making one, and you will price the next project on a guess.
Should non-billable time be recorded?
Always. Internal work, rework, admin and business development are real costs of running the business. A timesheet that holds only billable hours tells you your revenue per hour and nothing about your margin. In Invoice Crowd every log carries a billable flag, so non-billable time stays visible in the timesheet without ever reaching an invoice.
How detailed should a time-based invoice be?
Detailed enough that a reasonable client would not need to ask a follow-up question, and no more. A line per task is usually the right level. A single line invites the question "doing what?", and a line per individual log produces an invoice nobody reads. Invoice Crowd sets this layout per project.
Can different team members bill at different rates?
Yes. Team members are assigned to a project individually, each with an hourly rate, and the Member Hours billing method prices invoice lines from the rate of the member on each log. That keeps senior and junior time apart on the same task rather than blending them into one average.
Can I edit a time log after it has been invoiced?
No, and that is deliberate. Once a log in Invoice Crowd has been converted into an invoice it is locked: edits are refused, deletion is refused, and a later conversion will not pick it up again. It protects the hours behind an invoice you have already sent from changing after the fact.
Is rounding billable time to the nearest fifteen minutes acceptable?
It is standard practice and defensible when it is disclosed in your engagement letter and applied in both directions. It stops being defensible when every entry happens to round up. Whatever increment you choose, agree it in writing before the first invoice rather than explaining it after one.
