Tracking
How do you track billable hours?
Track them as they happen, not afterwards. Start a timer when the work starts, stop it when it stops, and label it with the client. Everything else — rounding, invoicing, reporting — is arithmetic on top of that one habit, and no amount of arithmetic can recover an hour you never wrote down.
Why
Billable time is recorded, not remembered. The moment you decide to reconstruct Tuesday on Friday afternoon, you are guessing, and the guess is always low: research on time reconstruction consistently finds people under-report their own working time, because the small pieces — a call, a fix, a round of feedback — are exactly the ones memory drops first. A running timer costs one tap and removes the guessing entirely.
Do this
- Start the clock before you start the work, not after you finish it.
- Keep one project per client or per engagement, so the split is made at the moment you punch in rather than at the end of the month.
- Write a one-line note on the session while you still remember what it was for. That line becomes the invoice line.
- Fix a forgotten start straight away rather than leaving a gap you will have to reconstruct later.
Avoid this
- Filling in a timesheet from memory on Friday.
- Running two clocks at once for two clients — one of them is wrong.
- Tracking to the client rather than to the piece of work, so you cannot answer 'what did that cost?'
- Leaving a timer running overnight and correcting it by eye the next morning.
What it looks like in the log
The same advice, as the row a tracked session actually leaves behind.
Northwind — API integration
- Date
- Tue 14 Apr
- In / out
- 09:12 → 12:48
- Note
- Auth handshake + retries
- Tracked
- 3h 36m
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
How accurate does tracking need to be?
Accurate enough that you would be comfortable showing the client the log. That is a lower bar than perfection and a much higher one than memory: you do not need to account for every minute, but you do need each session to be something that actually happened, at roughly the time it says.
What if I work in short bursts all day?
Punch in and out for each burst. Several short sessions on one project add up to the same total as one long one, and they have the advantage of being true. A tracker that makes starting and stopping cheap is the thing that makes this practical.