Hourly billing software
Bill clients by the hour without the admin. Track hours, set project, member and organisation rates, push tracked time to Xero as a draft invoice. From timer to invoice without retyping line items.
- 7-day free trial
- Cancel anytime
- Works with Xero
Hourly billing should be simple.
You track hours in one tool, type invoices into another, and somehow always end up with a Friday afternoon spent reconciling the two.
Hourly billing only takes minutes when the time tracker and the accounting tool talk to each other. Hour Cap is the bit in the middle.
- Rates differ per client. Sometimes per project. You remember most of them.
- Descriptions are cryptic, so clients query the invoices they cannot make sense of.
- Tax rates and revenue accounts have to be set on every invoice manually.
- The quick questions you answered by email are not on the invoice at all.
- Somewhere along the line you have double-billed a client.
Hourly billing, end to end
A rate you never have to remember, capture and description in one place, and a draft that lands in Xero already filled in.
Rates that don't need remembering
Set rates at three levels: organisation, member, project. Hour Cap picks the most specific one for every entry. You stop having to think about which client gets which rate.
- Default rate per organisation
- Override per team member for senior staff
- Override per project for negotiated client rates
Resolution is automatic. Most specific rate wins.
Track and describe in one place
Timer or manual entry. Multi-line description. The rate is already resolved. By the time you stop the timer, the line item is already invoice-ready.
- Persistent timer that survives navigation
- Manual entries in friendly formats like 1h30m and 1:30
- Multi-line descriptions that flow straight to Xero invoices
From tracked time to Xero draft
Open the invoice wizard, pick a client and a date range, choose your grouping, push. Hours, rates, descriptions, tax rates and branding theme are all already in place. Review in Xero. Send.
- One click from invoice wizard to Xero draft
- Group line items per entry, project, date, or person
- Invoiced entries auto-locked, so nothing is billed twice
The quick question you never billed for
Hourly work has one category it never captures: the request that takes four minutes to answer. Nobody opens a time tracker for four minutes. Do that twenty times in a month and you have given away most of a day.
The Customer Support Inbox puts the client mailbox inside Hour Cap, so the timer is already in front of you and the client is already filled in.
- Log a duration from the conversation, at the applicable project, member or organisation rate
- Small entries stack up into a line the client can read
- They reach the same invoice as the rest of the month
Morning. Two customers rang this week to say their Amex card bounced at checkout. Visa goes through fine. Can someone take a look before the weekend sale?
Hi Priya, found it. Amex was failing the address check on the new gateway rules. Fixed and tested both cards this morning, so you are clear for the sale.
The hourly billing loop
Set the rate once, track against it, and let the invoice build itself out of what you already wrote.
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Set
Add the client and the rate
Sync the client from Xero if you are connected. Put the rate at the right level: organisation default, member override, or project override where a client negotiated one.
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Track
Log the work, and the email about it
Timer or manual entry, with the description written while it is fresh. Requests answered in the inbox carry their own hours, so the small stuff stops falling off.
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Bill
Push a draft and send from Xero
Pick the grouping, push. Hours, rates, descriptions and tax arrive filled in, and your existing Xero workflow handles sending and payment tracking.
What hourly billing looks like when it works
Common questions
Match the invoice to the agreement
Hourly time, fixed project fees and retainers each have their own billing method.
- Hourly work: select eligible time, with optional 6-, 15- or 30-minute increments rounded nearest or up. Tracked time stays unchanged.
- Fixed-fee projects: invoice the remaining agreed fee independently of hours. Milestone and arbitrary partial invoices are not supported.
- Hourly retainers: select eligible time from completed periods. Fixed retainers: charge the agreed fee for started periods, including the current one.
- Fixed fees use project or period descriptions; hourly lines can preserve or combine time-entry descriptions.
- Xero invoicing requires Team or Business and is included during the trial.
Why I built Hour Cap
I'm Jonathan, a freelance web developer in Brisbane, Australia. After 15 years, I wanted my client work to run on one system instead of separate tools that didn't handle retainers or Xero, copy/paste errors, and time that never got invoiced. I needed one tool that handled retainers, fixed-price, and hourly projects, let me write proper multi-line descriptions, showed me what was actually profitable, and pushed straight to Xero as invoices. Nothing did all of it, so I built one. Today it is pivotal to my business: all my time tracking, invoice drafting, and profitability runs through Hour Cap, and it scales the same way for agencies and teams.
Independent and self-funded. When you email support, you reach the person who built it.
More about JonathanHourly billing without the admin
Every hour, including the four-minute ones. Free to start, and Xero on any paid plan.