How to Track Billable and Non-Billable Work

When you have projects that are billed by the hour, accurate reporting becomes essential. However, in real life not all work items and not all time records are billable. Therefore plain effort and time spent totals are not accurate enough for reliable invoicing. For this reason, Targetprocess makes possible to track billable and non-billable entities and time records separately.

When the solution is useful?

There are often circumstances that prevent you from billing the total time spent on a project. For example, the task may take longer than expected, it may be a staff member's first time performing this task, etc.

How tracking and reporting in Targetprocess works in general?

It starts from low-level work items: user stories, tasks, bugs, requests. Effort for the items is set per role and may be measured with ideal hours units. Moreover, with Time Tracking practice enabled, project members submit actually spent time using the Add Time and Timesheet features.

High-level planning items such as features, epics, projects, releases, sprints, team iterations summarize effort and time spent of nested work items. Some totals are calculated with predefined system fields. Advanced cases may be addressed with custom calculations. The calculations are performed by custom formula metrics, and once the metrics are set up the results are automatically populated to custom fields. The totals are displayed on views and in reports.

On any level of hierarchy, visual reports and tabular reports may be set up to provide breakdowns. For example, in a given project or feature the reports may calculate time spent per developers / QA engineers / any other roles, per week / month / sprint, per product area / component. The reports can be exported as tabular and graphical files.

How Targetprocess supports billable vs non-billable work distribution?

Per work item, it is possible to mark non-billable entities with assigned tags or custom field values. Per time spent record, it is possible to mark non-billable records with custom field values.

In high-level planning items billable and non-billable effort and time spent can be summarized with custom calculations: custom formula metrics and custom fields. Custom formulas include smart filters that recognize billable and non-billable records.

In visual and tabular reports the filters for billing type are supported. It allows you to build a report that filters out only billable or non-billable entities. Use reports to compare original estimates with billable and non-billable totals.

Further Reading

• Tracking Billable and Non-Billable Time Records