Why fixed-price freelancers should record their hours
If you charge a fixed price, it’s tempting to think time tracking is only for people who invoice by the hour. But the hours are still a cost.
Imagine quoting £900 for a website refresh because you expect it to take 12 hours. You complete the design, then spend another afternoon incorporating revisions, an hour on client calls and several short sessions fixing mobile details. The fee stays at £900, but the amount of time you invested has changed.
Recording time helps you see that difference. It doesn’t mean every extra hour should become an additional charge. It gives you evidence for better estimates, clearer change requests and decisions about which kinds of projects suit your business.
Use one job for each piece of client work
A lightweight system is enough:
- Client: Oak & Field
- Job: Website refresh
- Sessions: Homepage layout, mobile revisions, client call, final testing
If the same client asks for a separate monthly newsletter, record that as a different job. This keeps the website’s hours distinct from other client work.
Use session descriptions that will still make sense months later. “Third revision to homepage header” is much more useful than “Design”. You can make the descriptions brief; they don’t need to become detailed timesheets.
Keep your own administration, promotion, learning and breaks separate from client-delivery time if you want to assess the true cost of running your freelance business.
Worked example: when a twelve-hour estimate becomes eighteen
Here’s a plausible record for the Oak & Field website refresh.
| Work | Actual time |
|---|---|
| Initial design and layout | 6 h 15 min |
| Responsive styling | 3 h 30 min |
| Client calls and feedback | 1 h 15 min |
| First round of revisions | 2 h 45 min |
| Additional revisions | 2 h 15 min |
| Final testing and handover | 2 h |
| Total | 18 h |
You estimated 12 hours but recorded 18 hours. That’s six extra hours, or 50% more time than planned.
At a £900 fixed fee:
- Expected effective rate: £900 ÷ 12 hours = £75 per hour.
- Actual effective rate: £900 ÷ 18 hours = £50 per hour.
Neither figure changes the client’s agreed price. The value is knowing what happened, so you can decide whether to adjust future quotes, spell out revision limits more clearly or allow a larger testing budget.
The calculation is easy to do in a spreadsheet after exporting your time. A basic timer does not need to claim to be profitability software to give you useful evidence.
What to do when the client interrupts another project
Suppose you’re working on Oak & Field’s website when a different client rings about an urgent brochure change. If you leave the website timer running, the brochure call gets charged to the wrong project in your time records.
Instead:
- Pause the website session.
- Start or resume the brochure job for the other client.
- Record the call or change.
- Finish that work.
- Return to the website session and resume when you’re actually working on it again.
This keeps each project’s hours intact without requiring you to remember the interruption at the end of the day.
If you forget to start the timer, add a manual session while the event is still clear in your memory. If you forget to pause, correct the affected interval rather than keeping time you know you didn’t work.
A useful way to review revisions
Revisions are one of the easiest sources of underestimated freelance time. Rather than arguing about whether a project “felt like a lot of revisions”, record the hours spent.
Compare them with the scope you agreed:
- Which revisions were part of the original brief?
- Which came from new requests?
- How much time was spent clarifying feedback?
- Did changes elsewhere create extra testing?
Keep factual records, not accusatory notes. The purpose is to understand the work and make future scoping conversations easier.
A short post-project review can be as simple as: Estimated 12 hours, actual 18; mobile testing and later revisions accounted for most of the difference. That’s immediately useful when you prepare your next quote.
Do you need a subscription to do this?
No. A notebook, spreadsheet or basic timer can work. What matters is that you use it consistently and can retrieve the records later.
A useful freelance tracking setup should make it easy to start immediately, separate clients and jobs, handle interruptions, correct mistakes and export your data. More elaborate software is worthwhile only if you actually need features such as invoicing, collaboration, budgets or approvals.
Doing it in TapSpan
TapSpan is an iPhone app for straightforward time recording. You can start a Quick Timer without creating a project first, organise sessions under customers and jobs, pause or switch when another client needs attention, and review the hours afterwards.
Finished sessions can be exported to CSV if you want to compare estimated and actual time in a spreadsheet. TapSpan doesn’t calculate project profitability or manage client contracts. It gives you the time record on which you can make those decisions.