Billable hours are the time you spend on tasks or projects that you can charge directly to your client. As a creator, consultant, or any professional who bills by the hour, this concept is key to ensuring you're paid for the actual work you do. Billable hours cover activities like meetings, project development, research, or even travel, as long as they're tied directly to the client’s needs. Knowing what qualifies as billable ensures your invoicing stays accurate and that you’re not leaving money on the table.
Non-billable hours are tasks you can’t bill to your clients, even though they’re necessary for keeping your business running. Think of them as all the behind-the-scenes stuff—administrative work, internal meetings, marketing, or training sessions. While they don’t directly make you money, keeping track of non-billables is essential to understanding how your time is spent overall. This way, you can better separate what’s chargeable from what’s not and avoid billing mistakes.
To calculate billable hours, you need to track the time you spend on client-specific tasks. Here's a simple method:
This process helps you create invoices that are clear and detailed, showing clients exactly where their money is going.
Tracking your billable hours ensures you’re compensated fairly for the work you do. For creators, it also gives insight into how your time is split between client work and running your business. On top of that, this habit can boost your productivity by highlighting where your time goes and what can be adjusted for better efficiency. Ultimately, it helps you make smarter decisions about how you price your work and manage your workload.
There are different ways to keep track of your billable hours, and the best method depends on what works for you:
Digital solutions are often more accurate and less time-consuming, helping you focus more on creating rather than managing time logs.
More billable hours usually means more income, so here are some tips to maximize them:
By being strategic about your time, you can increase your billable hours and manage your workload more effectively.
To fully optimize your billable hours, consider using tools that simplify time-tracking and project management. Automating tasks like invoicing and tracking your hours ensures that no billable work slips through the cracks, saving you both time and effort.
Billable hours are the time you spend on any task directly tied to a client's project. This includes things like meetings, research, project development, or travel. Essentially, if the task is for the client and contributes to their project, it’s billable.
Billable hours are tracked by recording the time you spend working on tasks for your client. You then multiply the hours worked by your hourly rate and invoice the client based on that total.
Billable hours are for tasks you can charge to your client, while non-billable hours involve work you do to run your business, like internal meetings, marketing, or administrative tasks that don’t directly contribute to client projects.
The most effective way to track billable hours is through time-tracking software or apps. These tools help you log your time automatically and reduce the chances of missing out on billable work. Spreadsheets can work too, but digital tools are more efficient and less prone to errors.
To calculate billable hours for invoicing, simply total the time spent on client-related tasks, multiply by your hourly rate, and generate an invoice based on that amount.
