Here’s how to track your hours worked in Liquid and how to know when those hours will appear on your invoices.
Many independent contractors and freelancers bill by the hour, and even those who bill on other terms (flat project fee, weekly, etc.) often prefer to track hours worked as well. After all, accurate estimates come from tracking and monitoring projects closely. Knowing how much time it takes to finish a job or project can help make your independent consulting or creative business more profitable.
Here’s how to track your hours worked in Liquid.
Track your hours in Liquid with Time Tracking
The Time Tracking section will appear on each active or completed project detail page. Regardless of the project’s rate structure (flat, hourly, daily, weekly, quarterly, or other), this section will appear as long as the project has deliverables that have been accepted/approved by your client.
Press the Add Entry button to start creating a new hour tracking entry. Each time tracking entry should correspond to a specific date and service or deliverable must include a short description and must include billable hours. Once you have completed all required fields, the entry will automatically save your hours.
If you need to edit your hours before invoicing, simply edit the appropriate field and then navigate elsewhere; your changes will save automatically. If you’d like to delete an entry, press the trash can icon for the specific entry. Note that deleted entries cannot be recovered.
Creating Invoices in Liquid
You can create an invoice for a specific project from the Invoices page or the specific project page. The invoice can be previewed, saved as a Draft, and/or sent to the client.
How hours tracked drive Invoices for hourly deliverables in Liquid
The hours entered in Time Tracking are used to auto-populate invoices that are created for each project. The details of these entries are automatically pulled into your invoices, and the total hours billed are generated by the sum of billable hours being invoiced.
How hours tracked drive Invoices for non-hourly deliverables in Liquid
If you are tracking hours for deliverables with other non-hourly rate structures in Liquid (flat, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or other), the hours tracked in Time Tracking entries are still used to auto-populate invoices that are created for each project. The details of these entries are automatically pulled into your invoices. However, the total hours won’t affect the amount being billed. For daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly deliverables, you will have the enter the quantity to bill for. For flat-rate deliverables, the quantity will be set to 1.
As with hourly deliverables, the line items for these non-hourly deliverables will list the date and description as well as information about the number of hours worked. Just as for hourly deliverables, if the date does not have any billable hours associated with it then that line item will not list any hours in the details.
Editing or deleting hours tracked
As stated above, if you need to edit your hours before invoicing, simply edit the appropriate field and then navigate elsewhere; your changes will save automatically. If you’d like to delete an entry, press the trash can icon for the specific entry. Note that deleted entries cannot be recovered.
Once hours have been invoiced (or saved to a draft invoice), it is not possible to edit or delete them from the hours’ tracker ledger. If hours have been pulled into a draft invoice (an invoice that has been saved but not yet sent to your Client), then you may delete the draft invoice to enable the editing or deletion of those hours line items. Deleting a draft invoice will release those hours entries from the Invoiced Entries section into the section of entries that are editable (that may be deleted).
Viewing previously invoiced hours
The hours previously invoiced are hidden by default but can be viewed by pressing Show Invoiced Entries to expand this section. Press Hide Invoiced Entries to hide the section once you’re done.
The future of Time Tracking in Liquid
At the moment, the Liquid Time Tracking feature only supports hourly rates. However, in the future, you will also be able to track days, weeks, months, and quarters worked in Liquid. For these types of rate structures, you will still be able to track hours on those deliverables since we understand it can still be valuable to do so when billing is not hourly.
Need other time-tracking features in Liquid? Use the chat to reach out to us anytime!
