Billing
What is the difference between billable and non-billable hours?
Billable hours are the ones a particular client has agreed to pay for on a particular piece of work. Non-billable hours are everything else you do to stay in business: pitching, admin, invoicing, learning, your own website. Only the first goes on an invoice, but tracking both is what tells you what your effective rate really is.
Why
The test is not 'was this work?' — it is 'did a client agree to pay for this, on this job?'. Answering email about an active project is usually billable. Answering email from someone who has not hired you is not. The reason to record the non-billable side anyway is that it is the difference between your hourly rate and what you actually earn per hour worked: bill twenty hours in a forty-hour week and your real rate is half what you quoted.
Do this
- Keep a project for the non-billable work too, so you can see how much of the week it takes.
- Agree up front which categories are billable — calls, revisions, project management — and write it in the contract.
- Bill for the meeting. A scoping call on live work is work.
- Compare billable hours to hours worked once a month; that ratio is the number that decides whether your rate is enough.
Avoid this
- Quietly absorbing 'small' billable work because it feels awkward to charge for twenty minutes.
- Billing a client for time spent learning a tool you will use on every future job.
- Treating non-billable time as invisible, then wondering where the week went.
- Deciding what counts as billable after the work is done and the invoice is due.
What it looks like in the log
The same advice, as the row a tracked session actually leaves behind.
Studio admin — non-billable
- Date
- Fri 17 Apr
- In / out
- 16:05 → 17:20
- Note
- Invoicing and chasing PO
- Tracked
- 1h 15m
All of this is easier when the hours were written down as they happened. Punch O'Clock is a free tracker that does it in one tap, works offline, and exports the range you are billing.
Free. No ads, and no account unless you want sync.
Related questions
Should I show non-billable hours to the client?
Generally no. It is your business overhead, not their line item, and putting it on an invoice invites an argument about work they never commissioned. The exception is when a contract explicitly covers project management or reporting time, in which case it is billable and should be named as such.
Is travel time billable?
Only if you agreed it was, before you travelled. It is one of the most common sources of invoice disputes precisely because both sides assume the opposite by default, so it belongs in the contract rather than in a conversation after the fact.