Billable hours, rounded the way you actually invoice

The page keeps a simple timesheet and applies one rounding policy to all of it. Log the work first and decide how to round afterwards, since the raw minutes are the only part you cannot reconstruct later.

Log the time

Set the date, name the client or project, and write a description in the words the client will read on the invoice. Record the time either as minutes worked or as a start and end time, whichever matches how you tracked it. If the end time falls before the start time the entry is treated as running past midnight. Leave the rate blank to use the default, or type a different one for work billed at a second rate. Every entry stays editable in the list, and the list is grouped by client with a subtotal on each group.

Choose an increment

The increment is the smallest unit you are allowed to bill. Six minutes is one tenth of an hour and is the standard across law firms, so 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3 read as six, twelve and eighteen minutes. Quarter hours are common in consulting and agency work. No rounding bills the exact minutes, which is the only option that never adds time nobody worked.

Round per entry or per day

This is the setting that changes invoices, and most timers hide it. Rounding per entry takes every line up to the next increment on its own. Rounding per day takes all the work for one client on one date, adds up the real minutes, and rounds that total once. The card on the left shows both totals side by side so you can see what the choice costs. Under per-day rounding each line still shows a billed figure, worked out by sharing the rounded day total across that day's entries in proportion to the time each one took, so the lines add up to the day.

Export it

Download CSV builds a file with the date, client, description, raw minutes, billed hours, rate and amount for every entry, plus a total line that records the rounding policy used. It opens in any spreadsheet and imports into most billing systems. Nothing is uploaded; the file is built in the browser and saved straight to your downloads.

One Tuesday for a single client at $250 an hour, billed in six minute increments, rounded up. Four entries: a 4 minute email, a 7 minute call, a 3 minute email, and 92 minutes of drafting. The real total is 106 minutes, which is 1.77 hours.

1. Rounded per entry: 4 becomes 6, 7 becomes 12, 3 becomes 6, and 92 becomes 96. That is 120 minutes, or 2.00 hours, which invoices at $500.00.
2. Rounded per day: 106 minutes rounds up once to 108, which is 1.80 hours and invoices at $450.00.
3. The same work, the same increment, and a $50.00 gap. Across 200 days that is $10,000 of difference from a setting nobody discussed.

Where the gap comes from

Per-entry rounding pays the rounding penalty once per line, so it punishes exactly the behaviour clients want, which is contemporaneous logging of short tasks. A lawyer who records six one minute emails separately bills 0.6 hours for six minutes of work. The same lawyer batching them into one entry bills 0.1. Per-day rounding removes that incentive, because the rounding happens once no matter how the day was split up.

Rounding is a billing term, not a personal preference. Whatever this page calculates is only defensible if it matches what your engagement letter, statement of work or retainer actually says. If the agreement is silent, the safe reading is that you bill time worked, which means no rounding or nearest rather than always up.

Six minute increments are the legal industry standard and are widely accepted because they are small. Quarter hour increments attract far more scrutiny, and billing guidelines from insurers and corporate legal departments often ban them outright or require per-day totalling. Per-day rounding is usually the fairer version for the client, and saying so in the agreement is an easy thing to be right about.

Two habits keep the whole thing honest. Record the raw minutes even when you bill a rounded figure, which this page does for you and puts in the CSV. And write descriptions that let a reader understand what the time bought, since a vague line is the thing that gets an invoice queried, not the rounding.