What Are Billable Hours? Time Tracking Tips To Get You Paid

I love how Clockify allows my contractors to independently log billable hours. Track time and analyze your company’s efficiency across projects, clients, departments, and employees. Tracking billable hours is not just limited to an independent contractor, consultant, or freelancer.

An excellent time tracking software can help you overcome these challenges, ensuring that you bill clients accurately. It’ll also help improve your employees’ work performance in the process. Professionals can’t bill their employers or clients for all the time you spend on the project, but tracking non-billable hours is as important as billable ones.

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Non-billable hours are those hours for which you don’t pay your employees or freelancers. Many in-house employees also need to calculate their billable hours. You can accurately track time for all your tasks and projects using Time Doctor. All the non-billable and billable tasks you create are automatically tracked under the project name so that you can know the amount of time you worked for a particular client.

When running your own business, there will be situations when your employees will need your help with solving an urgent problem. Sometimes, you’ll have more than one issue to figure out, which can be incredibly stressful. This professional document should include the services you’ve rendered and other particulars to the business and payment. A billable hour may not cover every administrative task on your daily to-do lists.

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For example, let’s say client X has asked for a multitude of changes to a project where you spent 15 extra non-billable hours for the month. With the billable tasks lined up for the next day, you’ll know just how much time you can allocate to non-billable items. If you’re a freelancer or even own a small business, you may want to increase your billable hours to raise profits. When you complete a project or at the end of each billing cycle, add up all your billable hours for each client.

• With just a single click, you can bill your clients for tasks and communications.
• The whistleblower who previously worked for the department said KPMG proposed $1 million worth of new work that was already covered by existing contracts.
• Billable hours seem like they should be black and white, but they aren’t always.
• Eventually, most attorneys will memorize this chart and won’t have to worry about converting their time.

After you’ve decided on your choice of hourly billing practice, you can adjust your time tracking system to align with your billing cycle. For example, if you are a lawyer at a firm, you may not necessarily be paid according to your billable hours. Strategic decisions regarding who at a law firm is doing a task can boost profitability, and simultaneously pass savings onto clients. The term, “billable hours” can sometimes cause confusion because people in many different professions charge for their work through invoicing. Building contractors and freelancers, for example, could be said to work something akin to billable hours on a daily basis.

Example of a contractor’s billable and non-billable hours

Stop goofing off during business hours and you may be amazed to see how much your billable hours increase. Tracking and recording that time, invoicing for that time, and determining the productivity of that time is far more challenging. To keep your hours on-track with an easy-to-use legal practice management solution, book a demo with Clio today. To maximize on an attorney’s billable hours, some law practices resort to increasing their overall work hours to upwards of 70 or 80 hours per week.

If you use a cloud-based accounting solution, you can easily track your billable hours using its time-tracking feature. You’ll simply have to start the digital timer in your accounting software and assign the time to the relevant client. Maintaining a template to track your billable hours accurately is also a useful idea.

For example, a project manager might have a rate of $1,000 a day but employees assigned lower rates may do much of the work for a given project. The client may be charged a combined rate based on the billable hours of all employees involved in the project. The amount charged to clients has to be adequate to cover the employee’s salary and other business expenses. Calculating an appropriate rate is essential, particularly for companies that depend on income from clients for most or all of their revenue.

To decide on your hourly rate, set a target for the annual salary you’d like to earn. Do some research and make sure your target salary is in line with what other businesses offering similar services earn. You can also use a https://www.bookstime.com/bookkeeping-services/vancouver calculator to help expedite the process. For example, if you spend 45 minutes drafting a witness list, just follow the column for “minutes spent” down until you find the interval that contains 45 minutes. “I was instructed to record time spent on internal projects against Defence codes,” he said.

If your employer requires you to bill hours, then this is one of the most important functions you’ll perform. Because many employers who make their money on billable hours gauge your performance based on how many hours you’ve billed. It is always important to bill accurately and ethically, of course.

• There are tasks that a lawyer does that are just part of the work needed to work at a law firm, and then there are tasks that are directly related to the client’s case.
• The bill, in most cases, must therefore be paid by the client themself.
• To figure out how productive your employees are, you can compare their billable and non-billable hours.
• The billable hour is a critical part of most law firm’s ability to do business.
• All you’ve to do is track time for your work hours and deduct the non-billable work time from them.

Only a select few industries actually have requirements for billable hours. Within the legal profession, for example, attorneys are required to complete a set number of billable hours each week. Track productivity, attendance, and billable hours with a simple time tracker and timesheet. Create professional looking invoices from your billable hours and rates with just a few clicks. Time-tracking software can be a lifesaver for consultants and sole proprietors who find themselves juggling multiple clients simultaneously. Not only does it make tracking time a lot easier, but it also can be eye-opening when you realize how much time you haven’t been billing.

You can use cloud-based time tracking solutions that allow you to track your billable hours easily. It’s as simple as starting the timer and stopping it when you’re done. In the case of partners, equity partners are heavily dependent on having enough billable hours in a law firm to get paid a decent salary. Equity partners are paid a base salary but the vast majority of their compensation may come from their equity share in the law firm.