Harvest
Time Tracking
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Easy Billable Hours Calculator

Harvest is a time tracking and invoicing tool that captures every billable hour to prevent revenue loss, offering detailed reports and flexible billing.

Try Harvest Free

What should you charge per hour?

Most freelancers and consultants dramatically undercharge. This calculator accounts for what most people miss: non-billable time, taxes, and overhead.

$
Accounting for vacation, holidays, sick days
60%
Most freelancers can bill 50-70% of their time. The rest goes to admin, marketing, proposals, and learning.
$
Software, insurance, equipment, accounting, taxes beyond income tax, etc.
Your break-even rate $0
Recommended rate (+20% buffer) $0
Billable hours per week 0h
Equivalent daily rate $0

Start tracking your billable hours

Walk through the entire flow below. Start a timer, check your reports, and create a real invoice — all in three clicks.

Go ahead — start tracking!

One click and you're timing. Try it right here: start a timer, add an entry, edit the details. This is exactly how it feels in Harvest.

  • One-click timer from browser, desktop & mobile
  • Works inside Jira, Asana, Trello, GitHub & 50+ tools
  • Duration or start/end — your call
  • Day, week & calendar views to stay on top of it all
  • Friendly reminders so no hour gets left behind
Acme Corp
Website Redesign
Homepage layout revisions
1:24:09
Content Strategy
Blog calendar planning
1:30:00
SEO Audit
Technical audit report
0:45:00
Brand Guidelines
Color system documentation
2:15:00
Logo Concepts
Initial sketches round 1
1:00:00
Today's total 6:54:09

Understanding Billable Hours: The Foundation of Professional Revenue

Billable hours represent the time professionals spend on tasks that can be directly charged to clients, forming the core of revenue generation. In contrast, non-billable hours include essential activities like administrative work, internal meetings, and training, which do not directly contribute to income but are crucial for business operations. Accurately recording billable hours is vital as even a small lapse can significantly impact revenue. For instance, delaying time tracking can result in a 10% loss of billable hours by the end of the day, escalating to 50% by week's end. For professionals billing at $350/hour, this could mean losing $50,000-$75,000 annually.

Harvest addresses these challenges by providing a robust time tracking system that captures every minute of billable work efficiently. With one-click start/stop timers and manual entry options, Harvest ensures that no billable hour is missed, thus maximizing revenue potential.

Mastering Billable Hour Calculations: A Step-by-Step Guide

Calculating billable hours accurately is essential for professionals aiming to maintain transparency and optimize their earnings. The standard practice in many industries, such as legal, is to bill in 0.1-hour increments. This method, although seemingly small, can significantly affect revenue, as capturing just five additional 0.1-hour entries daily can increase annual earnings by $43,750 per attorney at a $350 hourly rate.

Harvest simplifies this process by offering detailed reporting and customizable inputs for various billing scenarios, including hourly and project-based billing. Users can easily track their time in real-time, avoiding common pitfalls like block billing, and ensure that every minute worked is accounted for correctly.

Best Practices for Maximizing Billable Time and Efficiency

To maximize billable hours and improve efficiency, professionals should adopt a structured approach to time tracking. This includes agreeing on billable tasks and rates upfront, setting up project scopes, and maintaining real-time logs of both billable and non-billable hours. Real-time tracking prevents the significant revenue loss associated with delayed entries.

Harvest enhances these best practices by differentiating between billable and non-billable tasks, providing users with better financial insights. Its detailed reports allow professionals to measure productivity and revenue generation through billable efficiency metrics, thus optimizing their billing accuracy and client transparency.

Harvest's Easy Billable Hours Calculator

This preview showcases Harvest's easy-to-use billable hours calculator, helping you track and maximize revenue accurately.

Harvest billable hours calculator interface for easy time tracking.

Easy Billable Hours Calculator FAQs

  • Billable hours are the time professionals spend on client work that can be directly charged, contributing to revenue. They differ from non-billable hours, which include necessary tasks like admin work, that do not generate direct income.

  • With Harvest, you can calculate billable hours by using its one-click timers or manual time entry. The tool automatically logs time, differentiates between billable and non-billable tasks, and generates detailed reports for accurate billing.

  • To calculate billable hours, you'll need to know the time spent on each task and the associated billing rate. Harvest simplifies this by allowing you to set customizable rates for various tasks and projects, ensuring accurate calculations.

  • Harvest helps track non-billable hours by allowing you to log all activities, differentiating them from billable ones. This provides a comprehensive view of time spent, aiding in better workload management and financial planning.

  • Accurate tracking of billable hours is crucial for maximizing revenue, maintaining client transparency, and ensuring compliance with industry standards. With tools like Harvest, you can prevent revenue loss from unrecorded work.

  • Many industries, especially legal, use 0.1-hour increments (6 minutes) as the standard for billing. Harvest supports this standard, ensuring fair and profitable billing practices.

  • Yes, Harvest provides customizable billing options, allowing you to set different rates for various projects and tasks. This flexibility helps tailor billing to fit specific client agreements and project scopes.