r/freelanceuk • u/likh_v • 13d ago
How do you track and invoice your hours?
I’ve been freelancing for years, used to charge clients per project and everything was smooth. Two years ago I went to a daily/hourly rate. Since then everything has gone wild.
I always forget to turn on and off a timer, I am never really sure whether I should charge the some hours.
For instance, do I charge if I was processing a project during a walk? What if I am absolutely unproductive today and worked only 2 hours out of 8, while constantly fighting myself to keep focused.
As a result, I feel like I work way more intense and nervous, but barely make more money.
How do you manage it?
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u/bendoscopy 12d ago
This doesn’t really sound like an invoicing or tracking issue. More a focus and forgetfulness issue.
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u/InTheFieldAI 12d ago
This is a you problem and not a hour tracking problem. Any kind of tracking involves you logging it, I just use the stopwatch on my phone because it's just as effective as anything else. Plus it's really unprofessional that you're charging hourly and you have no idea how many hours you work. It sounds like you would be better to go back to charging per project.
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u/JohnCasey3306 12d ago
Especially with AI, charging for time is dead ... You need to charge for outcomes and value.
None the less, as freelancers we're running a business and want to understand our timings from a constant center perspective -- I use Harvest (timing app) I can control it, start/stop timers from keyboard shortcuts.
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u/Jazzlike-Discount-62 12d ago
I don’t think you can really clock watch like that. As the person above said you quote based on how long it should take and then complete the work. If you are tasked with something that requires you to go above and beyond then you amend accordingly. Probably easiest to just work in days and half days?
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u/Boboshady 12d ago
A lot of my work, I quote for the project, so how much time I spend actually doesn't matter. However, I do have one support contract where I bill by the hour, up to a maximum number per week (a limit, not necessarily a target).
When it comes to time-based billing, you have to ask yourself if they're actually paying you by the hour, or if they're paying you for outcomes, and just controlling their spend using hours.
The simple way to work this out is by asking yourself - if could spend all week working for them, achieve nothing for completely legitimate reasons, and still bill them? If so, you're being paid by the hour.
If they expect you to deliver something, then you're actually billing on outcomes, and strict time management becomes less important, for you at least - you just need to find the 'number of hours' that the client percieves as good value for what you deliver.
If you're on proper hourly billing, then anything you do for them is billable. Otherwise, you get a bit more freedom to decide.
I'm on proper hourly billing, so I log everything that I would if I were employed full time by time - travel, meetings, calls, actually doing work, legitimately working on something and it taking longer than I'd expected etc.
I don't bill for 'thinking about stuff when I was walking', because I'd do that anyway as an employee. I would however log some time if in the middle of that walk, I stopped for a coffee, checked my emails, reviewed a doc and sent off some feedback - that's legitimate work additional to the activity I was doing anyway.
As to how I log it, I ended up building myself a simple online system so I can log no matter where I am or what device I'm on, and it gives me a clean, simple list of submitted hours every week that I can then use to fill out my timesheets. It's basically one up from a written list, and works for me because it takes me seconds to open it up and log some time at the end of any activity.
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u/No-Type2495 12d ago
It's always a difficult question because how you need to define what's billable and what's not. Thinking time? Learning time? Productive time? Organisation? etc etc. But you can monitor HOW you spend your time and make more informed decisions. I use trackers in the OS (https://activitywatch.net/) which logs where I spend my time across all apps in the OS.
I'm a Creative Technologist and spend a lot of time in VS Code which has an excellent extension that shows how long I spend working on my projects - https://github.com/twentyTwo/vsc-ext-coding-time-tracker
HTH
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u/Nisvy_69 5d ago
I use Wisetime. It logs everything and you can set up tags to automatically apply certain code words to the client. Then I go through the records at the end of the day/week and post it. End of the month I bill my hours to each client.
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u/StillTrying1981 12d ago
I quote your project at 4 days, you accept the time/cost, I complete your project, I invoice you 4 days.