Anyone who sells their time knows this: hours that aren't tracked are hours that don't get paid. A twenty-minute phone call, two quick revisions, a meeting that runs over: by the end of the month, these can add up to entire hours missing from your invoices. Here's how to keep track of them without turning your work into an administrative burden.
Why time gets lost
- Reconstructing hours from memory: after a week, you remember the major tasks but forget the smaller ones.
- No connection to the customer: hours are written down in a generic spreadsheet, making it difficult to work out who should be billed.
- Hourly rates change, and you can no longer remember which rate applied on a particular day.
- Billing by guesswork, without an itemised breakdown that the customer can review.
Three simple rules for tracking your time
1. Track time while you work, not afterwards
A timer that starts and stops with a single click is more reliable than any reminder. If you forget to stop it, it's better for the system to do it automatically, with a maximum time limit, than to end up with a thirty-hour task by mistake.
2. Link every time entry to a customer and project
When time is recorded directly against the right project, there's nothing to work out at the end of the month. If the project is linked to a quote, you can also compare actual hours with the estimated time.
3. Separate billable and non-billable hours
Internal meetings, training, administration: tracking these activities shows how much of your working time actually generates revenue. Time that shouldn't be charged to a customer should be marked as non-billable.
Your hourly rate should be locked in
If you change your hourly rate today, last month's time entries shouldn't change in value. The correct approach is for each time entry to retain the rate that applied on the day it was recorded. This keeps historical totals accurate while new entries use the updated rate.
From tracked hours to invoices
This is where you see the difference between a spreadsheet and a business management platform. With CursusOffice, a customer's unbilled, billable hours can be turned into an invoice draft in a single step: one line for each activity, with the quantity expressed in hours and the recorded hourly rate. The system calculates amounts and VAT; you review everything and decide when to issue the invoice. Hours that have already been invoiced cannot be accidentally modified. If you delete the draft, those hours become available again.
A habit worth developing every week
Set aside ten minutes every Friday to review the week's hours by customer: a task that's taking longer than expected, a customer requesting more work than originally planned, or hours that still need to be assigned. Correcting an entry today takes a minute; reconstructing it at the end of the month takes an hour.
What about profitability?
Knowing how many hours you spend on a project is the first step towards understanding whether it's worth your time. Compare the project's revenue with the cost of the time you've invested: if your estimated hourly cost is realistic, you'll quickly identify unprofitable projects and customers for whom you should consider proposing a different price. It's a useful performance indicator, but it isn't an accounting profit figure: it doesn't take taxes or other costs into account.
In summary
- Use a timer or manual time entry, but always record your hours immediately.
- Link every time entry to a customer and project.
- Save the applicable hourly rate with each entry.
- Generate invoices from tracked hours, with an itemised breakdown of activities.
- Spend ten minutes reviewing your time entries every week.
The Time Tracking feature is included in CursusOffice plans designed for professionals and agencies. You can try it free for 30 days.
