How to track billable hours without losing money.

Why tracking matters even when you charge a fixed price

If you bill by the hour, untracked time is unbilled time. If you charge fixed prices, untracked time is worse: it is the only way to know whether a job made money. Without it, every quote is priced from memory, and memory is consistently optimistic about how long things took.

Track as you go, not at the end of the week

Time reconstructed on Friday afternoon misses the short tasks that add up — the quick call, the five emails, the fix that "took a minute". A running timer, started when you begin a task and stopped when you switch, is far more accurate than any recollection. If a timer does not suit how you work, write entries at least daily, while you can still remember.

Whatever you use, record the same four things for every entry: the client, the project or task, the duration, and a short description the client would understand.

Decide what counts as billable

Agree it with clients up front, so the invoice holds no surprises. Typically:

• Billable: the work itself, client meetings and calls, research specific to the job, revisions, and project-specific admin such as preparing a handover.
• Usually not billed directly: sales and quoting, general admin, learning, and your own marketing.

Non-billable time is still real time. It has to be covered by your rate, which is why an hourly rate that only works if every working hour is billed is too low. The hourly rate calculator builds it in.

Rounding and minimum increments

Many professionals bill in increments: six minutes (a tenth of an hour) is common in law and accounting, fifteen minutes elsewhere. Pick one, state it in your terms, and apply it consistently. Rounding every two-minute email up to fifteen minutes erodes trust quickly; rounding a forty-three-minute call to forty-five does not.

Know your utilisation rate

Utilisation is billable hours divided by available working hours. It tells you how much of your week actually earns money. Nobody bills one hundred percent: sales, admin and gaps between jobs take a real share of the week, which is exactly why non-billable time has to be priced into your rate. Track it monthly: a falling utilisation rate is an early sign of a pipeline problem or of work that is taking longer than it should.

Turn hours into invoices every week or month

Unbilled time loses value with age. Clients query old hours more, and you forget the details. Pick a rhythm — weekly for hourly retainers, at each milestone or month-end otherwise — and invoice every unbilled hour for that client at once, with a summary of the work. Then mark those entries billed so nothing is invoiced twice or missed.

Include enough detail that the invoice explains itself: a line per task or per week with hours, and the full time log available on request. The free invoice generator handles the layout.

Use the numbers to fix your pricing

After a few fixed-price jobs, compare the hours you quoted with the hours you spent. If a type of job runs over every time, either the quote or the process needs to change. This comparison is the most valuable thing time tracking gives you, and the main reason to keep doing it even when nobody asks to see the hours.

Inside an AWGCOR account, the timesheet runs a timer you can start and stop from any device, shows your week at a glance, and turns unbilled time for a client into an invoice in one step — see tracking time in the dashboard.