Hours you do not record are hours you do not bill. Most freelancers who reconstruct their week from memory on a Friday undercount it, and the short tasks go first: the ten-minute call, the quick fix, the email that took half an hour. A simple routine fixes that.
Agree what counts
Settle with each client what you charge for before you start. Calls and meetings? Revisions beyond the first round? Travel? Research? Writing it down once saves arguing about it on every invoice. See Billable and non-billable hours for the usual grey areas.
Start a timer when you start the work
A running timer is more accurate than any estimate made later. Start it when you open the task and stop it when you stop, including when you stop for lunch. If you forgot, add the time by hand as soon as you notice, on the day it happened, while you still remember it.
One entry per task, named for the client
Write a short note the client would recognise: “Homepage copy rewrite” rather than “writing”. A day of short, named entries is easy to check and easy to bill. One eight-hour entry called “client work” is neither.
Mark each entry billable or not
Track the non-billable time too, and mark it. It is the only way to know how much of your week is client work, which is what your rate depends on. The hourly rate calculator shows how much that share moves the number.
Check the day before you close the laptop
Five minutes at the end of the day catches a timer left running over lunch, an entry on the wrong project, or a call you never recorded. Five minutes on a Friday afternoon cannot do the same for a whole week.
Decide on rounding, and say so
If you round time, agree it with the client and apply it the same way every time. Rounding time for billing covers the common rules and what they cost each side.
Invoice on a schedule
Pick a rhythm, such as the last working day of the month or the end of each project stage, and invoice everything unbilled at that point. Unbilled hours that sit for months are harder to explain and slower to be paid.
How Involets does it
Involets has one timer, which you can start from the desk, from Chrome’s toolbar with the extension, or from the Mac menu bar. Time you add by hand lands on the day you choose. Each entry is billable or non-billable, new entries can default to either, and the timesheet’s day view shows how much of the day was non-billable. Rounding to 15 minutes is a setting. When you invoice, only billable, unbilled entries are offered, so nothing is billed twice.
See Time tracking, Start and stop the timer and Add time by hand.