Billable hours are the hours a client pays for. Non-billable hours are everything else you do to keep the business running. Both are work, and you need both on your timesheet to price yourself properly.
Usually billable
- Doing the work the client asked for.
- Meetings and calls about that work.
- Revisions within the rounds you agreed.
- Research the project needs, if you agreed to charge for it.
Usually not billable
- Finding clients: pitching, proposals, networking.
- Admin: invoicing, bookkeeping, email that is not about a project.
- Learning and practice.
- Fixing your own mistakes.
The grey areas
Travel, onboarding calls, revision rounds beyond the agreed number, and time spent waiting on a client’s feedback are where disagreements start. None has a single right answer. Decide each one with the client before the project starts, and put it in the agreement.
Why the non-billable hours matter
Your rate has to pay for the whole week, including the hours no client pays for. Suppose you work 40 hours and 26 of them are billable: your billable share is 65%. If you need $6,900 a month and work 46 weeks a year, those 26 hours a week come to about 100 billable hours a month, so you need about $69 an hour. Price as if all 40 hours were billable and you would charge $45 and fall well short.
Try your own figures in the hourly rate calculator.
Watch the share over time
If your billable share drops, something is taking time away from client work: too much admin, a client who needs a lot of unpaid back-and-forth, or not enough work coming in. Tracking both kinds of time is how you see it early.
How Involets does it
Every entry in Involets is billable or non-billable, and you choose which new entries start as in Settings. The timesheet’s day view shows the day’s non-billable time on its own, and only billable entries are offered when you make an invoice. Reports put what you billed beside the hours you tracked. See Billable time and rounding.