Billing
Should you bill a client for breaks?
No. If you have stopped working, stop the clock. A lunch break, a school run or an hour on someone else's job is not billable, and the cleanest way to keep that true is to punch out and punch back in rather than to run a long session and shave it afterwards. A log the client could read without a footnote is worth more than a tidier-looking one.
Why
The distinction people struggle with is not lunch — it is the twenty minutes of staring out of a window that solved the problem. Thinking about the work is working. Standing in a queue is not. The practical rule that survives scrutiny: if you would be comfortable telling the client what you were doing in that period, it stays on the clock; if you would rather they did not ask, punch out.
Do this
- Punch out when you step away for anything longer than a moment, and punch back in when you return.
- Split a day into several short sessions rather than one long one with mental deductions.
- Keep the note honest — 'reviewing spec' is fine, and it is what makes the row defensible.
- Correct a session you forgot to stop as soon as you notice, rather than at invoice time.
Avoid this
- Leaving the timer running through lunch and rounding it off later.
- Billing the gap between two sessions because 'the project was in my head'.
- Adjusting durations at the end of the month, when you can no longer remember what happened.
- Charging a client for the time you spent working on somebody else's job.
What it looks like in the log
The same advice, as the row a tracked session actually leaves behind.
Kestrel — content migration
- Morning
- 09:30 → 12:15
- Afternoon
- 13:00 → 16:40
- Off the clock
- 45m
- Billed
- 6h 25m
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
What about a short coffee break at my desk?
Nobody is auditing five minutes, and stopping the clock for every one of them would make tracking so annoying you would abandon it. Use the same test as everything else: could you say out loud what you were doing? A five-minute stretch between two tasks passes. A forty-minute one does not.
Does the app track breaks separately?
There is no separate break control today — punching out and punching back in is the supported way to do it, and it produces a clearer record anyway, because the gap is visible in the log rather than hidden inside one long session.