How to track billable hours and turn them into an invoice

If you bill by the hour, every untracked hour is work you did for free. The hours that go missing are rarely the big blocks. They're the quick email, the five-minute fix, the call that ran long. A daily habit and a weekly check catch them.

Set your rate first

Know what an hour is worth before you start counting them. Your rate has to cover your income goal, taxes, expenses and the hours nobody pays for, such as sales and admin. The free freelance rate calculator helps you work out a number you can defend.

Decide what counts as billable

• Usually billable: the work itself, client meetings, revisions within scope, research for the project.
• Often billable, if your agreement says so: travel, project management, short client emails.
• Usually not billable: sales calls, writing proposals, invoicing and your own admin.

Write your rules down and put them in your proposal terms. A client who agreed to them up front won't be surprised by a line on the invoice.

A daily tracking routine

1. Create one project per client or engagement, with its hourly rate.
2. Start a timer when you begin a task and stop it when you switch.
3. Add a short description to each entry so the client understands the line later.
4. Mark each entry billable or not as you go. At month end you won't remember.
5. If you forgot the timer, add the time manually the same day while you still remember it.

Review your week

Once a week, look at your hours by day and by project. Fill gaps, merge tiny entries if your client prefers fewer lines, and check that nothing billable is marked otherwise. Fifteen minutes on a Friday beats reconstructing a month from memory.

Turn hours into an invoice

At the end of the billing period, total the billable hours per project, multiply by the rate and list them as line items with a description and date range. Add tax if you charge it, set a due date and send it. For a one-off invoice, the free invoice generator makes a PDF without an account.

Doing it in SoloWOS

In SoloWOS Time Tracking, you start a timer in one click, add time after the fact, mark entries billable and see your week with daily totals. Reports summarize hours by project and client for any date range, with CSV export. You can also start a timer from a task in Notes & Boards.

When it is time to bill, open a new invoice in SoloWOS Invoicing, choose the project and date range, and use "Add unbilled time". It pulls the billable entries in as line items at the project's hourly rate. With your Stripe account connected, clients pay by card on a Stripe-hosted page, and the invoice is marked Paid from the payment itself.

Time Tracking is built for your own billable time. It does not run payroll, and Invoicing is not accounting software. Solo includes 50 invoices a month and Team includes 200.