Here is a quiet question with expensive answers: when you do 20 minutes of work, what lands on the invoice?
If your system only thinks in whole hours, one of two things happens. Either the 20 minutes rounds up to a full hour and you have overbilled the client by 40 minutes, or it rounds down to nothing and you worked for free. Both answers are wrong, and over a year of phone calls, quick fixes, and small visits, both add up to serious money or serious trust.
Billing increments are the fix
Professionals solved this a long time ago with billing increments. Attorneys and consultants bill in six-minute increments, a tenth of an hour. Trades and field service commonly use the quarter hour. The rule is simple: time rounds up to the next increment, never down and never further than the increment.
With a six-minute increment, a 20-minute call bills as 0.4 hours. With a quarter-hour increment it bills as half an hour. Compare that to the whole-hour world where the same call was either 1.0 or zero.
Why round up and not to the nearest?
Rounding up to the next increment is the standard convention because the increment already represents your minimum unit of engagement. Picking up the phone has a cost even if the call runs four minutes. The client understands this when it is stated in your terms, and the increment keeps the rounding small enough that nobody feels gouged.
Match the increment to the work
- Six minutes: right for hourly professionals whose day is many short touches: calls, emails, document reviews.
- Fifteen minutes: right for field work, where the natural unit of effort is bigger and travel is involved.
- Thirty or sixty minutes: right when you only ever work in long blocks and want simple invoices.
WrkOrdr applies this automatically. Professional Services accounts bill in six-minute increments by default, every other layout uses the quarter hour, and you can override the increment for your company in settings. Log a start and end time and the billable hours come out correct, consistently, on every entry and every invoice.
Put it in your terms and stop apologizing
One sentence in your engagement terms is all it takes: time is billed in six-minute increments, rounded up. After that, the invoice is just the policy doing its job. The awkwardness of billing for short work disappears when the rule was agreed to before the work began.