Bill every hour. Miss nothing. Learn to track time, manage projects, create invoices, and stop leaving money on the table.
Danielle is a marketing consultant. She bills $175/hour and works with 6 clients. Every Friday, she sits down to figure out her hours for the week. "I think I spent about 3 hours on the Henderson account... maybe 4?" She rounds down to be fair. She forgets the 45-minute phone call on Tuesday. She doesn't count the 20 minutes reviewing their social analytics. Over a year, those "maybes" and "about 3 hours" add up to $28,000 in unbilled work. She has no idea.
If you bill for your time, every untracked minute is money left on the table. Not because you're dishonest with clients — but because human memory is terrible at reconstructing a workweek.
Most service professionals lose 10-15% of billable hours to poor tracking. At $150/hour and 30 billable hours per week, that's $225-$337 per week — $11,700-$17,550 per year — evaporating from a single person's revenue.
Industry Insight: A study by AffinityLive found that professionals who track time in real-time (as they work) capture 18% more billable hours than those who reconstruct their time after the fact.
Track time as it happens. A system that lives where you work, starts with one click, and turns tracked hours directly into invoices — no spreadsheets, no guessing, no Friday afternoon archaeology.
1. Why do most professionals lose 10-15% of their billable hours?
Ryan is a freelance graphic designer. He finished a logo for a client on Tuesday and a website mockup on Thursday. By Friday, he can't remember if the logo took 3 hours or 4. He checks his Photoshop file history — 3 hours 40 minutes. He would have guessed 3. That's $60 he nearly didn't bill.
A time entry captures one block of work. It answers four questions: Who was it for? When was it done? How long did it take? How much does it cost?
| Field | What It Captures | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Customer | Who you did the work for | Henderson Marketing |
| Project | Which engagement (optional) | Website Redesign |
| Date | When the work happened | March 18, 2026 |
| Hours | How long (quarter-hour increments) | 2.50 |
| Description | What you actually did | "Homepage wireframe v2" |
| Hourly Rate | Your rate for this work | $150.00 |
| Total | Auto-calculated: hours × rate | $375.00 |
As you type hours and rate, the total updates in real-time. Enter 2.5 hours at $150/hr and instantly see $375.00. No calculator needed. No math errors.
Write descriptions your client would understand on an invoice: "Homepage wireframe v2 with client revisions" beats "design work." When these entries become invoice line items, clear descriptions prevent client questions.
2. You enter 3.25 hours at a rate of $200/hr. What total does the system calculate?
Patricia is an attorney. She bills in 6-minute increments — every tenth of an hour counts. When a client calls, she used to glance at the clock and think "I'll remember when this started." She never did. Her best guess was always "about an hour" when the call was really 1 hour 42 minutes. At $350/hour, those 42 minutes are $245. Per call. Per day. She was hemorrhaging revenue from memory-based billing.
The live timer solves the "I'll remember" problem. Click start when work begins. Click stop when it ends. The system calculates the exact duration down to the minute.
Try it! Click Start above to see the timer in action.
Use the timer when you're starting a task and want exact time capture. Use manual entry when logging time after the fact (yesterday's meeting, last week's research). Both create the same time entry — it's just a matter of when you capture it.
Forgot to stop a timer before leaving for the day? The "Stop All Timers" function catches any orphaned timers and closes them out. It calculates the hours based on when the timer started, so you can adjust if needed.
3. What happens if you refresh the page while a timer is running?
Raj runs a digital agency. Last month a client called furious: "Why am I being billed for your team meeting?" Raj checked — someone on his team had logged 2 hours of internal sprint planning under the client's name as billable time. It wasn't malicious, just careless. One checkbox would have prevented the call, the refund, and the damage to the relationship.
Not all time is billable. Internal meetings, training, admin work, business development — you need to track these hours too (for utilization metrics and capacity planning), but you should never bill a client for them.
Every time entry has a Billable toggle. It defaults to "on" because most tracked time is billable. But one click turns it off for internal work.
Client work, project deliverables, consultations, support calls
Team meetings, training, admin, proposals, internal projects
When you go to create invoices from your time entries, the Unbilled View only shows entries marked as billable. Non-billable entries are automatically excluded. No risk of accidentally invoicing a client for your team lunch.
4. You spent 2 hours in an internal team meeting. How should you log this?
Sandra is a CPA. On Monday, she needs to see every time entry for a specific client. On Wednesday, she needs daily totals for her whole team to check utilization. On Friday, she needs to know who has unbilled time ready to invoice. Three different questions, three different views of the same data. In her old system, each one required a custom Excel report. Now it's three clicks.
Every entry in a detailed table. Date, customer, project, description, hours, rate, amount, status.
Daily summaries grouped by user. Total hours, billable hours, and amounts per day.
Time entries grouped by customer, ready to invoice. One click per client to create an invoice.
See every time entry as a row. Sort by date. Edit or delete entries that haven't been invoiced yet. Perfect for reviewing individual entries or finding a specific piece of work.
Grouped by day and user, showing entry count, total hours, billable hours, and total amount. A single table that answers: "How much did each person work each day this week?"
Groups all unbilled, billable time entries by customer. Each customer card shows total hours and amount, with a "Create Invoice" button. This is where tracked time turns into money.
5. You need to see how many hours each team member worked per day this week. Which view do you use?
Olivia runs a web design agency. Her biggest client, Apex Corp, has three active engagements: a website redesign, an email campaign, and ongoing SEO consulting. She tracks 40 hours a month for Apex, but when the CFO asks "How much have we spent on the website redesign specifically?" Olivia has to dig through descriptions and guess. With projects, she'd have the answer in 2 seconds.
Customers tell you who the work is for. Projects tell you what the work is for. When a client has multiple engagements — and most good clients do — projects keep everything organized.
| Field | Purpose | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Clear label for the engagement | Website Redesign |
| Code | Short reference for quick ID | APEX-WEB |
| Customer | Which client this belongs to | Apex Corp |
| Hourly Rate | Default rate for this project | $175.00 |
| Budget Hours | Estimated hours (optional) | 120 hours |
| Budget Amount | Estimated total (optional) | $21,000 |
| Status | Active, completed, on hold | Active |
When you create a time entry and select a customer, the project dropdown automatically filters to show only that customer's projects. Select a project and the hourly rate auto-fills from the project settings. Less typing, fewer errors.
Don't need budget tracking? Skip it. Projects work perfectly as simple labels. A solo freelancer might just use project names to separate "Consulting" from "Design" for the same client. An agency might set detailed budgets. Use what fits your business.
6. What happens when you select a project that has an hourly rate of $175 while creating a time entry?
Victor owns an IT consulting firm. His biggest client calls: "Can you tell me how much we spent on support in Q1?" In his old spreadsheet, that question meant 20 minutes of filtering, summing, and double-checking. Now he selects the client, sets the date range to Jan 1 – Mar 31, clicks Apply, and reads the number. Twelve seconds.
| Filter | What It Does | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Date Range | Start and end dates | "Show me last month" or "Q1 only" |
| Customer | One specific client | "How much time did we spend on Apex?" |
| Project | One specific engagement | "Hours on the Website Redesign project" |
| User | One team member | "What did Sarah work on this week?" |
| Status | All / Unbilled / Invoiced | "Show me everything that hasn't been billed yet" |
Filters apply across all three views. Set your filters once, then switch between List, Timesheet, and Unbilled — they all respect the same criteria.
At the top of every view, four cards update in real-time based on your filters:
All time in the filtered set
Only the billable subset
Hours × rates, summed up
Number of time entries
7. A client asks: "How much unbilled time do you have for my Website Redesign project?" Which filters do you set?
Nathan is an IT consultant with 47 unbilled hours spread across 6 clients. In his old system, invoicing meant: open Excel, filter by client, add up hours, open his invoice template, copy the line items, calculate totals, save as PDF, email to client. Six clients × 15 minutes each = 90 minutes of admin. With Kantivo's time-to-invoice feature, he invoiced all 6 clients in 3 minutes. Click, review, send. Click, review, send. Six times.
This is where time tracking pays for itself — literally. Every hour you tracked becomes a line item on a professional invoice, with one click.
When you create an invoice from time entries, the system does six things automatically:
Because time tracking is built into your accounting software, invoicing from time entries doesn't just create a PDF. It posts real double-entry journal entries to your general ledger. Your financial statements update in real-time. Your accountant will love you.
When creating an invoice, you can set payment terms: Due on Receipt, Net 15, Net 30, Net 60, or Net 90. The due date auto-calculates based on the invoice date and your selected terms.
8. When you create an invoice from time entries, what accounting entries are automatically posted?
Gloria manages a construction estimating firm with 8 estimators. End of month, she needs to know: who worked how many hours, on which clients, and how much is billable? In the old days, each person emailed her a spreadsheet. She'd spend half a day merging 8 files, fixing formatting, and reconciling discrepancies. Now she opens Timesheet View, sets the date range to the full month, and the answer is on screen. All 8 people. Every day. Every hour. One table.
When you have a team, time tracking becomes about visibility. Who's overloaded? Who has capacity? Is everyone logging their hours?
Every user logs their own time entries and runs their own timers. As a manager, you see everyone's entries in the Timesheet and List views. Each person's timer is private to them — only one timer per user at a time.
9. Your team of 5 people all track time in Kantivo. How do you see the whole team's hours for last week?
Before Kantivo: The Harrison Agency billed $180,000 last year across 12 clients. Same team, same hours, same rates. After implementing time tracking with live timers, project grouping, and one-click invoicing, they billed $243,000 the following year. Same clients. Same team. Same hourly rates. The difference? They stopped leaking. Every phone call got logged. Every email got tracked. Every hour got billed. $63,000 in recovered revenue — from work they were already doing.
Once a time entry has been invoiced, it becomes read-only. You can't edit the hours, change the rate, or delete it. Why?
Invoiced entries show a "Locked" badge and the edit/delete buttons are disabled. If you made an error on a billed entry, the correct approach is to create a credit memo or adjustment — not to quietly change the original record.
Time tracking isn't about micromanaging your team or watching the clock. It's about capturing the value of work you're already doing. Every untracked hour is a gift to your clients that you didn't intend to give. Track it, bill it, and watch your revenue match the effort you're actually putting in.
10. After invoicing a client for 15 hours of work, you realize one entry should have been 3 hours instead of 2. What's the correct approach?