Rounding means recording time in fixed steps instead of to the minute. It makes invoices tidier and short tasks easier to price, but it moves money between you and your client, so it should be agreed and applied the same way every time.
The common increments
- Six minutes, or a tenth of an hour. Common in law and accounting. A 4-minute call is billed as 0.1 hours.
- Fifteen minutes, or a quarter of an hour. Common for freelancers and agencies. A 4-minute call is billed as 0.25 hours.
- To the minute. No rounding at all, which is the most exact and the hardest to read on an invoice.
Up, or to the nearest
Rounding up always bills the full step: 16 minutes becomes 30 with 15-minute steps. Rounding to the nearest step bills 16 minutes as 15 and 23 minutes as 30. Rounding up favours you; rounding to the nearest evens out over many entries.
What it adds up to
Rounding up matters most when you have many short entries. Say a week has 20 short tasks averaging 7 minutes. To the minute that is 140 minutes. Rounded up to 15 minutes it is 300 minutes, so the client pays for an extra 2 hours and 40 minutes. At $60 an hour that is $160 a week. Over the same week, a few long entries barely change at all.
If your work is many small tasks, a smaller step or rounding to the nearest is fairer, and easier to defend when a client checks.
Minimum charges
Some freelancers charge a minimum for any piece of work, such as 15 minutes or an hour, because a five-minute fix still means stopping something else. A minimum charge is reasonable if the client knows about it in advance.
Make it a written rule
Put the increment and the direction in your agreement: “Time is recorded in 15-minute increments, rounded up per task.” Then apply it to every entry, the same way, so any invoice can be checked against it.
How Involets does it
Rounding is off unless you turn it on. With Round entries to 15 minutes on in Settings, the desk timer rounds when it stops, and a stopped timer always records at least 15 minutes. Time you type in yourself is never rounded, so you can always record an exact figure. See Billable time and rounding.