How to Set Up a New Client in Your Time Tracker Correctly

Most Billing Problems Start on Day One

Not at invoice time. Not when scope expands. On day one, when you created the client in your time tracker without thinking it through.

You used a vague project name. You did not set a billing rate. You lumped two different types of work under the same entry. And now, three months later, your time data is a mess and you are guessing at what to charge.

Five minutes of setup prevents all of that.

Start With the Client, Then the Project

In Time-Trak, clients and projects are separate layers. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

A client is the company or person paying you. A project is the specific scope of work. One client can have multiple projects. If you mix them up and create a new client record every time a new project starts, you lose the ability to see total hours across that relationship.

Set up the client once. Name it exactly how you refer to them in invoices. Then create the project underneath it with a name specific enough to be useful six months from now.

"Website Redesign Q3" is useful. "Web Work" is not.

Set the Billing Rate Before the Timer Runs

This is the step people skip because they are in a hurry to start.

If you do not assign a billing rate to the project before you log your first hour, one of two things happens. Either the system defaults to a rate that does not apply to this client, or you end up with entries at zero and have to recalculate everything manually at invoice time.

Decide the rate. Enter it. Even if you are still finalizing the contract, use your standard rate as a placeholder and update it once it is confirmed.

In Time-Trak, you can set different rates per project. Use this. A retainer client and a new project client often bill at different rates. Keeping them separate from the start means your invoice math is right without you having to check it.

Create Phase Tags If the Project Has Multiple Scopes

If the project has distinct phases, set up the naming structure before work begins.

Some projects have a discovery phase billed at one rate and an execution phase billed at another. Some have a retainer component and an ad hoc component running simultaneously. If you do not separate these in your tracker from day one, you will be untangling them at invoice time.

Use project phases or task tags to separate the work. Label them clearly enough that someone else could read your time entries and understand what happened.

Decide What Gets Tracked as Non-Billable

Every client relationship has overhead. Onboarding calls. Account management. That twenty-minute email chain that did not move the project forward.

Decide before the first week is over what category those hours go into. Non-billable is fine. Overhead is fine. Just pick a label and be consistent.

If you do not, you either end up billing for time you should not, or you end up with unbillable hours scattered across your data that inflate your apparent project costs.

Test the Timer Before the Project Goes Live

Run a two-minute test entry. Start the timer. Confirm it is logging to the right client and project. Stop it. Check that the rate applied is correct. Delete the test entry.

This takes ninety seconds and catches setup errors before they compound.

Nothing is worse than realizing after a week of work that you have been logging hours to the wrong project or at the wrong rate. The cleanup is annoying. The underbilling is worse.

One Client Setup Prevents a Hundred Small Fixes

Freelancers and small teams lose billing accuracy not because they stop tracking, but because they set up clients sloppily at the start and never fix it.

The right setup takes five minutes. It pays for itself the first time you generate an invoice without having to second-guess a single line item.

Track your time, bill every minute.

Time-Trak is a native Mac and Windows time tracker with a floating timer, automatic screenshots, and one-click invoicing.

Free during beta.

macOS + Windows · Floating widget · Auto screenshots