Time billing is suitable for businesses that predominantly sell time (such as accountants and lawyers) and businesses that sell both time and items (such as interior designers and mechanics).

You can establish billing rates based on the activity itself, such as consulting at $40 per hour and photocopying at 10 cents per copy. You can also establish billing rates based on an hourly charge-out rate for a particular employee or customer. For example, employee John Smith’s hourly consulting rate may be $60 per hour and subcontractor Acme Industries’ charge-out rate may be $80 per hour. You can even set an underlying cost to the activity where, for example, you estimate that the cost to employ John Smith is $45 per hour and Acme is $60 per hour.

An activity can be chargeable or non-chargeable. The ability to track non-chargeable activities can be very useful for businesses that want to record costs such as entertainment, which generally cannot be charged to the customer. The activities can be entered individually or grouped together on activity slips. The information can be adjusted quickly to generate time billing invoices, ready to send to your customers. Any items that you have sold to your customers can also be included with the activities in a single time billing invoice.

Time billing reports can be filtered to give you just the information you want. These reports monitor how you and your staff spend your time and whether it is spent profitably.