Bill your hours without retyping them

If you bill by the hour, the worst part is not the work. It is the end of the month, when you open a spreadsheet of hours, open your invoicing app in another tab, and type the same numbers into both. Every retype is a chance to bill 1.5 hours as 15, or to forget the Tuesday call entirely.

Groundbase tracks time and raises invoices in the same place, so the hours go onto the invoice as lines without passing through your keyboard twice. This is the guide to that path: start a timer, log what you forgot, let the rate fill itself in, tick the entries onto a draft, and take one back off if you change your mind. Time tracking is in the one plan, $19 a month or $199 a year, like everything else.

Start a timer, or log it afterwards

Start timer sits in the sidebar under Search. Say what you are working on, link it to a contact, company or deal if you like, and it starts ticking. The sidebar shows it running, and Stop saves the entry. On a phone in the web app it is the clock in the top bar; in the Android app it is on the Time screen and on each contact, company and deal.

Only one timer runs at a time. Starting a second one stops and saves the first. The timer lives on your account rather than on the device: a consultant can start it at her desk before a client call and stop it from her phone in the car park afterwards.

You can also start a timer from the Time tab of a contact or company, or the Time card on a deal, and it is linked to that record from the start.

For time you have already spent, Log time takes a duration in whatever form is natural: 1:30, 90m, 1.5h, or just 2 for two hours. Add the date and a start time if it was not today. A therapist who writes up Monday's session notes on Tuesday evening logs 45m with Monday's date and it lands on the right day.

Click any entry to edit it or delete it. A timer left running is capped at 24 hours when it stops, so a forgotten one never becomes a three-day entry. Edit it to the real time afterwards.

Link it to the customer so it is there when you invoice

The Linked to field takes a contact, a company, a deal, or any mix. Link a deal and its contact and company come along automatically, so the same hours show on all three pages. The invoice builder looks for unbilled time by customer, so link it now and it turns up when you invoice.

Time linked to nothing is fine too. Admin, prospecting and learning all count in your totals; they just never go on an invoice.

Every entry also appears on the record's timeline as Logged 1h 30m — what you did, next to the emails, texts and invoices for that customer.

Rates that remember themselves

Each entry can carry an hourly rate. Most of the time you leave it blank. Groundbase then uses the last rate you used for that deal, contact or company, then the last rate you used at all. A contractor who bills one builder at $85 and a homeowner at $110 types each rate once, and every later entry for that customer picks it up.

For entries where nothing applies, Settings → Invoicing → Time on invoices has a default hourly rate. New entries take the rate last used for their deal, contact or company first; this default covers everything else.

The rate is saved on the entry. Raising your rate in January never rewrites hours you logged in December.

Turn Billable off for time you would never invoice. Billable time that is not on an invoice yet counts as Unbilled, and that is the number the rest of this guide is about.

The Time page: what is waiting to be billed

Time in the sidebar (g then k) shows a week or a month at a time: total, billable and unbilled hours, with the unbilled amount in each currency you bill in. Entries are grouped by day, and By customer shows where the hours went. Filter to Unbilled and you have the end-of-month list without building it.

Add unbilled time on the invoice

Open a new invoice under Billing and choose the customer. Once they are chosen, Add unbilled time lists that customer's unbilled entries, including time on their deals. Tick the ones you want. Each becomes a line: what you did as the line name, the date and hours underneath, the hours as the quantity and your rate as the price.

A consultant with nine entries across the month ticks nine boxes and the invoice has nine lines with the right dates, the right hours and the right rate.

Two guards are worth knowing about:

• An entry over 10 hours is listed but not ticked. It is usually a timer somebody forgot to stop. Check it, edit it if needed, then tick it.
• Time recorded at a rate in another currency can be added, but without a price. If you logged hours at a CAD rate and are invoicing in USD, type the price in the invoice's currency before saving rather than letting a conversion guess for you.

Rounding is set once, under Settings → Invoicing → Time on invoices. The default bills exact minutes. If your terms say you bill in 15-minute blocks, choose up to the next 15, or the nearest 15; 6, 10 and 30 minutes are there too. Only the invoice line is rounded. The time entry keeps its real length, so your own records stay honest while the invoice follows your terms.

What happens when you save

The entries are marked as billed when you save the invoice, and show On INV-… from then on. Their hours and rate are locked while they are on an invoice, so a quiet edit to an entry cannot make the invoice and the time disagree.

Then the invoice works like any other: issue it to give it a number, send it from your own email address, and let the customer pay by card through your own Stripe account if you have connected one. None of that is specific to time, and the invoicing post covers it.

Unbilling releases the time

Mistakes happen before an invoice goes out. You tick the wrong entry, or the client asks you to hold two hours until next month.

To take time back off a draft, delete its line from the draft and save. The entry goes straight back to unbilled, with its real length and its rate, ready for the next invoice. Nothing is lost and nothing is billed twice.

The same is true further down the line. Voiding an issued invoice, or deleting a draft, releases its time to unbilled again.

Repeating invoices follow the same rule from the other side. A retainer you bill monthly with Repeat copies the lines, prices and taxes, but not the time you tracked, so a repeating invoice can never bill the same hours a second time.

From an AI assistant

If you have connected Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor over MCP, the assistant can start and stop your timer, log time in plain words ("two hours on the Riverbend job yesterday"), list entries and totals, edit or delete an entry, and put entries on a draft invoice. Those lines are the same as the ones the app makes, with your rounding and your own calendar day. It runs on your own subscription to that assistant; there is nothing extra from Groundbase. The MCP post explains the setup.

What it does not do

It does not invoice for you. Unbilled time waits until you open an invoice and tick it. There is no "bill everything on the 1st" switch. For a fixed retainer that is what Repeat is for; for hourly work, I would rather you looked at the list before it went to a customer.

It does not convert currencies on the invoice. An entry at a rate in a different currency arrives without a price, and you type one.

It is not a project tool. There are no budgets, estimates against actuals, or team timesheets. It is one person's hours, linked to the customers they belong to, on the invoice they belong on.

Invoicing is optional. Time you never invoice still counts in every total, so it works as a plain timesheet if that is all you need.

The help article on time tracking has the detail on every setting. If you price jobs before you start them, quotes with a deposit is the step before this one.

Questions about this one? Email me directly: blog-hours@groundbasecrm.com — I read every one.