How to Set Up Time Tracking When One Project Has Multiple Service Types

One project, three different kinds of work

You land a project that covers strategy, design, and some development. Maybe copywriting too. It all lives under one contract with one client. You start working and log everything under the same project name because that is the client.

By week four, your time report is a flat list of hours that means nothing. You cannot see whether the strategy phase came in under budget. You cannot tell how much of your total time went to development versus design. When you invoice, you are guessing which portions to highlight.

The setup is the problem. If you structure the project correctly before you start logging, the data tells you something useful.

Decide how you want to break it down before day one

There are two ways to handle a multi-service project in Time-Trak.

Option one: One project, multiple task categories. You keep everything inside a single project but use task or category labels to separate the service types. Strategy, design, development, copywriting each get their own label. Your reports can then filter and group by those labels.

Option two: Sub-projects or phases. If the billing rates differ between service types, or if you plan to invoice phases separately, treating each service type as its own project or phase gives you cleaner separation from the start.

Neither option is wrong. The choice depends on whether the billing rates differ and whether the client expects to see the work broken out separately on invoices.

When billing rates differ between service types

This is where setup really matters. If your strategy rate is $150 per hour and your development rate is $95 per hour, those hours cannot live in the same billing bucket. Mixing them means you will either overbill or underbill depending on which way you round.

In Time-Trak, you can assign billing rates at the project level. If your service types have different rates, separate projects or phases with their own rates is the cleaner approach. Log strategy hours to the strategy project. Log development hours to the development project. Invoice each separately or combine them on one invoice with line items showing the rate applied to each service type.

The client sees clarity. You see accurate data. Both things matter.

When rates are the same but you still want visibility

Even if you bill everything at one rate, separating service types by category or label still gives you useful information. You can see where the bulk of the hours went. If a client comes back for a similar project, you know that the design phase historically runs twice as long as strategy. Your quote is informed by data instead of memory.

Log by category consistently from the first day. A session that spans two types of work, say a meeting where you discussed both strategy and design, should be split if the time was meaningfully different. If it was one hour of mixed conversation, label it strategy or whichever was dominant and move on. Perfect is the enemy of useful.

What to tell the client upfront

If you are breaking out service types in your tracking, tell the client before work starts. Not because they need to understand your internal system, but because they should know what they will see on invoices and reports.

"I track strategy, design, and development separately so you can see exactly where the hours went" is a sentence most clients respond well to. It signals organization. It sets the expectation that invoices will be detailed, not just a total.

Check your structure before the first week is over

The time to catch a setup problem is in week one, not at invoice time. After your first few sessions, pull a quick report in Time-Trak and look at how the entries are organized. If everything is collapsing into one undifferentiated list, fix the category labels now. Three weeks of clean data is better than eight weeks of noise.

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.

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