Billing
How should you round billable time?
Round to the smallest increment you can bear to administer, apply it in both directions, and put the rule in the contract before the first invoice. Six-minute increments are the traditional professional standard and the easiest to defend. Fifteen minutes is common and acceptable if it is agreed. Rounding every session up to the hour is where rounding stops being a convenience and starts being a markup.
Why
Rounding is only fair when it is symmetric and disclosed. A rule that rounds 3 minutes up to 15 and also rounds 12 minutes down to nothing is a rounding rule; a rule that only ever rounds up is a price increase you did not mention. The client's objection is almost never to the increment — it is to discovering the increment for the first time on an invoice.
Do this
- Name the increment in the contract, in one sentence.
- Round both ways from the midpoint, so the error averages out over a month.
- Keep the raw tracked time in the log even when the invoice shows a rounded figure.
- Use a smaller increment for short, frequent tasks and a larger one for long blocks.
Avoid this
- Rounding every session up, regardless of size.
- Billing a one-hour minimum for a two-minute email fix, unless a minimum was agreed.
- Changing the increment between invoices.
- Rounding at all when the contract says you bill actual time.
What it looks like in the log
The same advice, as the row a tracked session actually leaves behind.
Halcyon — support retainer
- Tracked
- 2h 07m
- Increment
- 6 minutes
- On the invoice
- 2h 06m
- Difference
- −1m
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
Is a minimum charge the same as rounding?
No, and they should be written separately. A minimum charge says that any callout costs at least a certain amount of time; rounding says how a measured duration is expressed. Clients accept both far more readily when they are named as two different things in advance.
Should I round at all?
You do not have to. Billing exact tracked time is the simplest possible policy and it is impossible to argue with, which is precisely its advantage. Rounding exists to make invoices readable, not to make them larger.