Decent Billing Guide to Keeping Your Time

How design firms can keep better time records, avoid invoice disputes, and choose a timekeeping tool.

April 9, 2026 By Decent Billing Staff

Keeping time is not clerical housekeeping. For architects and designers, time records are the raw evidence behind the invoice, the budget conversation, and sometimes the client relationship itself.

If your team keeps time loosey-goosey at the end of the day, you may still have a rough sense of what happened. But rough memory is not enough when a client wants to understand why a phase is running long, why hourly work is higher than expected, or why the remaining budget is almost gone.

Why accuracy matters more as the bill gets bigger

The more you charge a client, the more reasonable it is for them to inspect the records. That is especially true near the end of a project, when the client budget is running out and every extra hour feels visible.

You owe accurate data to the client, and you owe it to yourself. Good time records can prevent weeks of back-and-forth about what happened. Bad records can turn into months of relitigating every meeting, drawing revision, site visit, email, and coordination call.

What good timekeeping looks like

Track time while the work is still fresh

End-of-day reconstruction is better than nothing, but it is easy to forget calls, context switches, markup rounds, consultant coordination, or the reason a task took longer than expected.

Tie every entry to the right project and phase

The question is not only how many hours were worked. It is where those hours belong, whether they are billable, and whether they fit the agreement the client signed.

Write notes that can survive client review

Short, plain descriptions are usually enough. The goal is to make the work legible later, especially when a client asks why the budget is nearly gone.

The practical rule

Time entries do not need to become a diary. They do need to be specific enough that a project manager can prepare an invoice without chasing everyone down, and clear enough that the firm can explain the bill if a client asks.

A good entry usually answers four questions: who did the work, which project and phase it belongs to, what kind of work it was, and why it belongs on the invoice.

Timekeeping tool comparison

Tool	Best at	Strengths	Watch out for
Decent Billing Our recommendation	Small design firms that want timekeeping connected to invoice prep.	Affordable, design-firm specific, built around hourly work, fixed fees, progress billing, credits, retainers, expenses, and accounting handoff.	More specialized than a general workforce-management platform.
Harvest Strong all-purpose option	Professional-services teams that want clean time tracking, budgets, reports, expenses, and invoicing.	Flexible timers and timesheets, project budgets, reporting, expense tracking, and invoice creation from tracked time.	Good general-purpose choice, but many design firms still need extra invoice-prep logic around phases, exceptions, and accounting workflow.
Toggl Track Best for simple tracking discipline	Teams that want lightweight tracking with flexible reporting.	Custom reports, billable rates, profitability views, report sharing, required fields, and locked entries.	Useful for tracking and reporting, but less focused on architecture-specific invoice assembly.
QuickBooks Time Best for QuickBooks-heavy teams	Teams already centered on QuickBooks payroll, scheduling, and workforce management.	Mobile time tracking, timesheet approvals, scheduling, payroll and accounting connections, and job-cost visibility.	Can be more payroll and workforce oriented than a small design firm needs for client invoice preparation.
Clockify Best budget tracker	Cost-sensitive teams that need basic time tracking and report exports.	Time reports, PDF export, spreadsheet export, custom reporting, and project progress views.	Often leaves the final billing rules and invoice-prep workflow to spreadsheets or another system.

Our recommendation

If all you need is a timer, several tools can do the job. If you are a small design firm, the more important question is what happens after the time is tracked.

Decent Billing is our recommendation because it keeps timekeeping close to invoicing. It is affordable, it is built around the way design firms actually bill, and it helps turn time data into ready-to-send invoices instead of another spreadsheet scramble.