Ask HN: How do you bill your freelance consultation services?
Not sure I understand where or why you are struggling.  If you are doing hourly consulting you have to track all your hours and invoice for them.  You are a one person show as a freelancer so you aren&#x27;t tracking 10 people, so this isn&#x27;t a big problem and trying to optimize on invoicing seems like there might be a different problem.  You do have to set clear boundaries with clients on what is billable hours and what isn&#x27;t though or they will kill you.<p>There are tools that can help make time tracking easier, I used to have my teams use an app (IIRC HoursTracker, or TimeTracker something like that) that let us setup projects, roles and rates and people could track their time in it.  The app was inexpensive, like $5-6&#x2F;per user and at the end of each week they would just use the app to send us their time.  It would put it in a csv file and email to admin so we could then add the details to the invoices for clients.  We didn&#x27;t really use the rates section of the app, but the csv could&#x27;ve easily been converted into an excel invoice with a tiny bit of script.  We did use the csv to import the time into our accounting tools too, made it nice to eliminate data entry mistakes.<p>I didn&#x27;t do so much freelancing as I built consulting groups where we did software&#x2F;hardware design&#x2F;development, marketing and go to market planning for clients across numerous industries.  So billable video calls and conference calls for strategy talks or status check ins were common.  For the vast majority of clients we also stopped billing hourly all together and did weekly flat rates or monthly retainer agreements which made invoicing easier, but we still tracked time using the app.<p>Just a comment, not necessarily your issue, but something I council new freelancers and startups on quite often.  A lot of business is done in excel and by hand, this is not bad, it actually forces vigilance and properly used is more powerful than a full blown ERP sometimes.  Dismissing the use of simple tools or feeling like everything has to be automated and perfect is a recipe for disaster IMO, automate only once you have a repeatable process that has low to no variation in output etc.