Time is the raw material of an hourly project and the early-warning system of a fixed one.
What an entry holds
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Project | Which job. Required. |
| Task | Which piece of it. Strongly recommended. |
| Date | The day the work was done, not the day it was entered. |
| Hours | How long. |
| Description | What you did. This ends up on the invoice. |
| Billable | Whether the client pays for it. On by default. |
| Rate | What it is charged at. Falls back to the project’s hourly rate. |
The description is not for you
On an hourly project the description is what the client reads on the invoice. That changes what it should say.
| Weak | Better |
|---|---|
| Design work | Logo concepts — three directions drawn and packaged |
| Meeting | Brand workshop with the marketing team |
| Amends | Second round of amends to the guidelines document |
Vague time entries cause more invoice disputes than high rates do. A client who queries “Design work — 14 hours” usually is not arguing about the money; they cannot tell what they are paying for.
Billable is a decision, not a default
It is on by default, which is right for client work. Untick it for:
- redoing something you got wrong,
- internal admin and meetings the client did not ask for,
- work that is already covered by a fixed fee,
- goodwill you have decided to absorb.
Recording it as non-billable is much better than not recording it. It still counts towards the cost of the job, which is how you find out that a client is unprofitable at the rate you agreed.
Log it on the day
Time reconstructed on a Friday afternoon is a guess, and it is always a guess in the direction of fewer hours than you actually worked. On an hourly project that is money; on a fixed one it is the number that would have told you the job was going wrong.
Where time gets logged from
- From the task — the usual way, because the task is already open.
- From the project, when the work does not belong to one task.
- From the timesheet screen, filling in a week at once.
Always attach it to a task where you can. Time with no task cannot be grouped on an invoice, and “Project work — 46 hours” is the invoice line clients query.
Rates, and where they come from
| Set on | Used when |
|---|---|
| The entry | Always wins. Use for genuine exceptions. |
| The project | The fallback for everything else. |
The normal setup is one rate on the project and nothing per entry. Reach for a per-entry rate when somebody senior did work at a different rate, and not otherwise — rates scattered across hundreds of entries become impossible to check.
An entry with no rate anywhere bills at nothing. If an invoice comes out lower than expected, an unset project rate is the first thing to check.
Where to go next
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