Billable hours: where your agency gives time away

An agency stops giving away billable hours when time is logged on the same task that will be invoiced, with its hourly rate, on the day the work happens. When the invoice comes from those logged hours instead of what someone remembers at the end of the month, small requests stop disappearing.

Picture a design agency with a client on a monthly retainer. During the month, "quick" changes arrive over WhatsApp, there is a call to review a banner, and two extra rounds of edits on a presentation. Nobody logs them because each took half an hour. On the last day of the month, the account lead opens the calendar and the inbox to rebuild what was done, invoices the retainer and writes off the rest, even though nobody ever decided to give those hours away.

Where billable hours slip away in an agency

The hours that go unbilled are rarely big ones. They leak in places that repeat from one agency to the next:

• Out-of-scope requests that arrive through an informal channel and get handled without opening anything.
• Work that belongs to no project, such as preparing a meeting or reviewing a contract, and so has nowhere to be logged.
• Time entered on Friday from memory, rounded down because nobody wants to inflate their week.
• Hours that were logged in a spreadsheet but never matched against the invoice, or that were billed twice because the sheet did not say which ones had already gone out.

These cases get fixed when logging time takes less effort than skipping it, and when the invoice is built from what was logged.

Log time on the task where the work happens

In AgentticCRM Tasks and time, a task can stand on its own, with no project, and only needs a title. If it comes from a client, a ticket, a proposal or an opportunity, you link it to that record and anyone can see where it came from. The call to review the banner now has a place to land.

Time is logged in two ways. The timer starts when you begin and stops when you finish; each person has only one running, and starting it on another task stops the previous one and saves its time, so the same hours are never counted twice. Manual entry covers what already happened: you note the minutes and what you did. Each entry keeps who, how many minutes and which day.

On the tasks of a project, every entry also adds to the project total, and the project can carry a budget and an hourly rate.

Which hours to bill and at what rate

Before logging anything, decide what is billable. On a retainer, part of the work is already paid for and part is extra. If both go to the same task, there is no way to separate them at the end of the month.

A simple habit is to open a separate task for each out-of-scope request. That task is marked billable with its hourly rate, and next to the logged time you see what the work is worth. Retainer tasks get logged the same way even though they are not billed, because those hours tell you whether the monthly fee still covers what the client asks for.

From logged hours to the invoice

When the work sits in a project, the invoice is prepared from there. AgentticCRM drafts an invoice with the hours not yet billed, at their hourly rate. Hours already billed do not come back in, and if you discard the draft, they return to pending for the next invoice.

You review that draft before issuing it. That is the moment to remove a line you agreed not to charge, or to explain in the notes what each item covers. Once issued, the invoice is not rewritten: if something has to be discounted, a credit note does it and keeps the reason.

Invoicing the hours is half the job. The other half is getting them paid, and that has its own places where money gets lost, as this article on unpaid invoices explains.

A short weekly review

Logging works if someone looks at it before month end. A brief Friday review is enough: the Tasks list filtered by status shows what is still open, and Reports has the project, task and time reports to see what was logged that week. If someone worked all week for a client and not one hour shows up, you catch it in time to fix it.

The same review is a good moment to talk to the client before invoicing. Telling them mid-month that several hours of changes fall outside the retainer is easier than surprising them with the invoice.

If your agency also sends newsletters or campaigns to its contact list, the next question is whether that fits in the CRM or needs another tool. We cover it in CRM and email marketing.

Frequently asked questions

Should we also log hours that are not billed?

It helps. Retainer hours are not billed separately, but they show how much work that fee really covers and give you data to renegotiate it.

Is logged time invoiced automatically?

No. You decide when to invoice. From the project, a draft is prepared with the pending hours and their rate, and you review it before issuing it.

What if someone logged the wrong minutes?

Each person can delete their own entries and log the correct time manually, with a note explaining the change.