Billable Hours Tracking Template & Alternatives To Track Smarter

Tracking billable hours ranks somewhere between “entering the 3rd hour of a never-ending meeting” and “listening to a know-it-all, martyr colleague” explain how they stayed up till 3 am fixing something they broke in the first place (while you politely smile and nod).

Yep. Tracking billable hours can be that eye-roll worthy.

No matter if you’re a freelancer juggling multiple clients, a lawyer billing in 6-minute increments, or just someone who wants to prove to your boss that you did work 47.5 hours this week, having the right system is key.

Tracking time should not be your enemy.

In this article, we’ll provide a billable hours tracking template that won’t make you want to pull your hair out, and list some smarter alternatives for tracking that will restore your faith in time tracking and timekeeping.

Let’s roll.

But first, what are billable hours?

Billable hours are the chunks of your day that you actually get paid for; all that client work, consultations, and project execution. Everything else, like meetings, admin tasks, and marketing activities, falls into the category of non-billable.

Now, here’s where things get spicy: if you’re not tracking your billable hours correctly, you’re basically working for free.

Billable vs. actual vs. delivery hours

Time tracking is not just about logging time; it’s about understanding where your time actually goes.

Are you billing for the full amount of work you’re doing? Or are your “actual hours” outpacing your billables?

Here’s the difference between these 3 terms:

• Billable hours are the ones you invoice to the client.
• Actual hours represent the reality of your work and show the time you actually spend on a project, including all the meetings, revisions, finishing touches, etc.
• Delivery hours are the hours it should take you to complete a project; they are your scoped, budgeted, and promised time.

Why are billable hours so important?

Because, as you know, time is money.

Tracking billable hours isn’t just a checkbox for invoicing.

It shows you where your time is going, your processes’ efficiency, and whether your projects are profitable.

Just imagine the following situation.

You scoped a project for 20 hours, but your actual time spent is 35, and you only billed for 20. You just gave your client a full workday and a half for free. Hope the client at least said thank you.

Billable hours also help you:

The point is, tracking billable hours has nothing to do with micromanaging minutes. Just the opposite: it’s about taking control of your time and income.

Free billable hours template

Now that you know how essential billable hours are for profitability, here’s a free billable hours template to help you out. The one that actually makes sense.

This template helps you:

• Log your daily billable hours.
• Get a clear view of your total hours worked vs. billed.
• Calculate monthly pay with ease.

If you want to use the template, copy it beforehand. Just go to File → Make a copy to create your own version so you can edit it. Just click the button below.

If you need a bit of help using the billing hours template, just keep reading. 🙂

How to use the billing hours template

So, you’ve got the template open.

It’s a Google Sheet—and yes, it’s free. And probably more visually appealing than most spreadsheets you’ve ever made at 11 pm in a panic.

The template has 3 sheets: Daily, Weekly, and Monthly billable hours sheets.

Here’s how to use it like a pro:

#1 Make your own copy of the template

Click on File → Make a copy to save it to your own Google Drive. Please don’t request edit access to the original; we like it the way it is. 😏

#2 Start with the Daily Billable Hours Sheet

Start at the basics.

At the top of the sheet, fill in your:

• Day, being the date you’re logging time for (e.g., June 16, 2025).
• Department: If you’re part of a team, write the department (e.g., Marketing, Design, etc.)
• Manager: Add your manager’s name or delete this row if you are self-managed.

Then, you track time, hour by hour.

Under the Time column (from 5:00 AM to 10:00 PM), write down what you were doing during each hour in the Activity column. Here are a few examples:

• 9:00 AM - Meeting with Client A
• 10:00 AM - Designing homepage layout
• 12:00 PM - Lunch
• 3:00 PM - Writing project proposal

Once you’ve logged all your activities for the day, count the total working hours. This number goes in the Total Hours row at the bottom.

In the Hourly Rate row, add your billing rate so you can calculate how much you’ve earned today.

The Daily Total Pay = Total Hours x Hourly Rate

#3 Move onto the Weekly Billable Hours sheet

The Weekly Billable Hours sheet is perfect if you prefer zooming out and looking at your weekly time quickly.

Here’s how to fill it in:

1. Once again, fill in the basics at the top.
2. Track each day’s work. For every day of the week fill in the Start time (as honestly as possible), Finish time, Duration (total time spent working that day will be calculated using a formula), Activity and Note (for any extra context, like whether the task was billable, if you went over scope, etc.).
3. At the bottom of the sheet, add up all your time for the week, total hours, and billable ones. Once you enter your rate, the sheet automatically calculates your Total Weekly Pay.

#4 Use the Monthly Billable Hours sheet

This sheet is perfect for when you want to see the big picture over an entire month.

Here are the steps to fill this sheet in:

1. Fill out the top section. The Start Date should be the first day of the month you’re tracking.
2. Log each day of the month. This sheet is a bit different than the previous ones; it requires you to add hours spent on breaks, paid time off taken for each day, and time taken off due to illness. Also, if you worked beyond regular hours, log it here.
3. Calculate total hours. The formula is: Finish Time - Start Time - Breaks. If you had a full day off (PTO or sick), just plug those hours directly into the correct column and leave the others blank.
4. Let the sheet do the math. At the bottom of the table, you’ll see Monthly Total Hours and Hourly Rate. Your Monthly Total Pay is calculated automatically.

The Monthly Billable Hours sheet should give you a clear view of how much you’re working and earning. Plus, it saves you from end-of-month panic when it’s time to invoice.

How to maximize your billable hours (without burning out)

Billable hours don’t just magically appear; you need to capture them. Track them. Defend them (to an extent).

And the trick is you track your billable hours without spending too much time on such activity.

Here’s how you can do so.

#1 You need a time tracking tool

Time tracking is the foundation of it all.

You’re probably underbilling yourself if you’re guesstimating your hours at the end of the week based on calendar invites, vague memories, and Slack messages.

Here’s what you can gain with proper time tracking:

• Confidence in billing. You know exactly what to charge, and can back it up with precise data.
• Understanding your time sinks. Are you spending 45 minutes daily checking your email? Two hours lost in feedback loops? Time tracking helps you spot these time eating activities.
• Smarter project estimates. The more you track, the more accurately you can scope future projects. Meaning, you’ll get happier clients and way higher profitability.

My suggestion for time tracking?

Forget the stopwatch apps and sticky notes.

You need a time tracking tool that fits how you work. Something like Memtime.

Memtime captures your time automatically in the background. Passively. Silently.

It tracks which tools you’re using and when, and logs it without you lifting a finger.

With Memtime, you get an accurate, passively built timeline of your day to turn your work into billables. But more on that later in the article.

#2 Reduce time leaks

Some work days feel like phantom days. Their sneaky minutes and half-hours seem to evaporate. You think you’ve had a productive workday, but when you go to log your hours, you don’t know where your time went.

Here’s what really happens during those days:

• A “15-minute” quick meeting.
• A bunch of Slack chats that you handled “like a pro”.
• A casual scroll to double-check one thing turns into a constant context and task switching.
• A “tiny” revision the client swore would take “no time at all” (but took away half of your day).

Individually, these don’t feel like much. Collectively, they disperse your focus, and worst of all,  they usually don’t make it onto your invoice.

That’s why you need to be diligent about stopping time leaks:

• First, set meeting boundaries. A 30-minute call doesn’t need to take 30 minutes off your day just because the calendar says so. Start on time, get to the point, and end ASAP, if you can. If you’re feeling brave, try canceling recurring meetings that don’t serve a clear purpose.

• Put admin work in a separate time block. Instead of constantly interrupting your tasks to reply to emails or organize files, batch all those non-billable tasks into one focused block. You’ll be more efficient and protect your billable time.
• Track. Track. Track. Track even the tiniest of non-billable tasks. Because five 5-minute tasks per day is 25 minutes, which is over two hours a week of unbilled work. You can use a tool that passively logs time to see how much time these little tasks really eat up. A tool like Memtime that captures everything you do across apps and tools, so you don’t have to remember those tiny time leaks.

#3 Automate what you can

If you want to achieve more (bill more) without doing more, you need to automate all those repetitive, manual tasks.

Every minute you spend on low-value admin is a minute you could’ve spent billing or delivering (even resting?). Automation helps protect your brain from burnout and ensures you maximize those billing hours.

Here are the 2 things you should absolutely be automating:

• Your timesheets. If you log time manually, you are probably forgetting to log time entirely and may be spending more time tracking time than doing the actual work. Memtime can help you with this step, so you can automatically get a complete timeline of your day.
• Invoices. Why should you repeatedly retype the same details when your time tracking tool can do the math for you and connect to an invoicing tool? You should be able to generate invoices based on your logged hours in the snap of a finger.

Automation helps you get your time back, focus, and improve your billable potential. When you don’t focus on admin work, you free up your brain for strategy, creativity, and actual paid work..

Let the software do the boring, repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work only you can do.

#4 Understand what is billable and what isn’t

You already know this: not all work is billable. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable, but it does mean it’s not money in the bank. And, understandably, you can’t bill your clients for “busy” time instead of real deliverables, so you need to be careful about how much time you're spending on billable vs. non-billable time.

Now, let’s break these two terms down, so you don’t mix them up.

As previously mentioned, billable hours are the ones you can confidently include on an invoice:

And here’s what’s not billable:

• All those internal meetings, quick check-ins, and briefings, etc.
• Business development activities like cold outreach, proposal writing, networking, etc.
• Marketing activities, including updating your portfolio, social media planning, and so on.
• Aaand chasing ghost clients that won’t get back to you, even after 10 follow-up emails. 🤷

So, let’s make one thing clear: just because you’re working doesn’t mean you’re billing. You can work 12+ hours per day and still end up with just a couple of hours that actually generate revenue.

That’s why you need to track your time. Even the smallest things can be billable, like a 12-minute client call or a quick update to a deliverable. Track them all.

Best tools to maximize your billable hours

Now, let’s discuss tools.

You don’t need a stopwatch to make the most of your billable time.

You need tools that track your time and do it intelligently, without interrupting your flow, providing insights into productivity, and helping you invoice accurately.

Here are 3 tools designed to help you maximize billable hours and reduce admin:

#1 Memtime

When it comes to automatic time tracking, Memtime is the GOAT.

And I am being a bit biased, but that’s only because Memtime has done so much for me in terms of reclaiming billable AND non-billable time.

Here’s why Memtime makes all the difference in time tracking:

• First things first, Memtime is an automatic time tracker built specifically for professionals who bill their hours. It’s trusted by software development teams, law firms, agencies, and creatives. In other words, it gets you and understands that the last thing you need is another distraction.
• Secondly, it runs silently in the background, tracking your time without constant pop-ups or reminders, allowing you to stay focused on your work, not your timer.
• And thirdly, there’s no learning curve or adoption time. You just open Memtime, let it run in the background, and it will capture your activity in programs and browsers as long as your computer is turned on.

Now that you know what it can do, here’s how it does it:

• Memtime has an automatic timeline, and your day and time in programs is displayed in 1-60 minute intervals.

• Once all your activity is captured, you can create time entries to export to your project software. Time entries can be as short as 1 minute, and there’s no limit on maximum duration.
• If you don’t use a project management app, you can log time entries using Memtime Projects.
• You can have multiple project management apps connected to your Memtime account.
• You can import tasks and projects and sync time entries directly into one of the project software tools (like Asana, QuickBooks, Xero, and so on). Unlimited custom integrations can also be developed for you.
• You can sync Memtime with your calendar, as it pulls events from any calendar you connected it to.

If you are down to try Memtime, start with our 2-week free trial. It takes less than 10 seconds to create a Memtime account so you can download and install the app.

Just click the button below to get started:

#2 Toggl Track

Toggl Track is a well-known time tracking app among freelancers, consultants, and small teams. It’s fairly simple and flexible.

Toggl Track offers automatic and manual time tracking. Automatic time tracking is available on the desktop app and manual within the mobile app.

Here are some of the tool’s key features:

• You get manual and automatic time tracking.
• There’s a Pomodoro timer you can use for focused work sprints.
• The app detects when you’re idle and sends you reminders.
• Toggl integrates (or rather connects to) with tools like Asana, Jira, Salesforce, and QuickBooks.
• Reports can show project profitability and earnings per client.

#3 TrackingTime

TrackingTime is a productivity and project management tool built for teams and freelancers. It offers time tracking features and built-in tools for collaboration, reporting, and invoicing.

Here are some of its notable features:

• The tool provides automatic time tracking; there is no Start/Stop timer.
• You can get customizable timesheets by project, task, or client and create invoices based on billable hours.
• The tool syncs with Google and Outlook calendars.
• It encourages team collaboration thanks to file sharing and notes.
• The tool allows you to auto-generate timecards from captured entries.

Wrapping it up

Tracking billable hours might never become your favorite moment of the day. But you can make it a more pleasurable experience using our billable hours tracking template

With the right tools (yes, Memtime!), a solid process (like the free billable hours template), and a little honesty from your side, you can reclaim your time, reduce stress, and get paid for the work you actually do.

Track wisely, bill boldly, and may your invoices always be paid on time. 🍀