Monthly client billing
Close the month without the panic. Review the month, approve timesheets, push every client invoice to Xero as a draft. One workflow, one sitting, with no CSV exports and nothing to rekey.
- 7-day free trial
- Cancel anytime
- Works with Xero
The end-of-month billing run, badly
Most teams treat monthly billing as a project rather than a process, and it eats days it does not need to.
Hour Cap collapses the cycle to one screen: pick a client, pick a date range, push to Xero. Repeat for the next client. The system tracks what has already been invoiced so nothing goes out twice.
- Someone chases missing time entries on the last Friday of the month.
- Someone else exports a CSV from the time tracker and starts typing line items into Xero.
- A retainer that overran is discovered two months too late.
- A month of client emails gets answered and none of it appears on any invoice.
- Two clients get billed for the same hour because nobody marked the entry invoiced.
A monthly billing run that doesn't take a day
See the month before you bill it, raise one draft per client, and let the system remember what has already gone out.
See the month before you bill it
Review time by month and client, then check the unbilled-work summary. Time reports show hourly value; fixed fees and invoice rounding can change what is billed. The invoice preview shows the amount you are about to send to Xero.
- Total hours and billable time value per client at a glance
- Spot retainer overruns before they hit the invoice
- Catch missing entries while the team is still in the building
One invoice per client. One click each.
The invoice wizard scopes to a single client and date range. Pick your grouping, push to Xero, move on. No CSV in sight.
- Line items grouped per entry, project, date, or person
- Hours, rates, descriptions, tax rates and branding themes filled in from Xero
- Drafts arrive in Xero for review, so you stay in control of when to send
Three drafts in Xero. Review and send.
Nothing gets billed twice
Once an entry is on a pushed invoice, Hour Cap marks it invoiced and excludes it from next month. Request a void from Hour Cap; the entries become available again once Xero confirms the deletion or void. You do not have to track this manually.
- Entries marked invoiced automatically on push
- Voided Xero invoices release entries for re-billing
- Failed pushes report the Xero error and stay in a recoverable state
February entries are locked to their invoice. New entries roll into March.
The month's email is part of the month's invoice
A billing run can only invoice what somebody wrote down. Every month, the work most likely to be missing from that pile is the correspondence: the questions answered, the changes agreed, the small requests handled between the scheduled work.
When the inbox lives inside the tracker, that time is already on the timesheet by the time you close the month. It shows up in the invoice wizard next to the project work, on the same client, at the same rate.
- Support threads carry their own hours, against a client and project
- Those hours appear in the unbilled-work rollup with everything else
- They can be grouped onto their own invoice line, or folded in with the rest
- Nothing needs reconciling between a help desk and a time tracker
An add-on at $12 per seat per month on the Team and Business plans, included in your trial.
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 monthly billing run
Three steps, in the same order, every month. The first one gets shorter the better your capture was.
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Close
Find what is missing before you bill
Filter the report by person and date and chase the thin weeks while people are still around. Support threads have already logged their own hours, so there is less to chase than there used to be.
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Approve
Only reviewed time is invoiceable
Run the approval dashboard where you use approvals. Entries still in review cannot be pushed, so nothing reaches a client before somebody has read it.
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Push
One draft per client, five minutes apiece
Invoice wizard, grouping, push. Drafts land in Xero with hours, rates, descriptions and tax already in place, and your existing Xero send flow takes over from there.
What changes at the next month-end
Related use cases
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 JonathanA billing run that takes one sitting
Every hour the month cost, including the ones spent in the inbox. Free to start, and Xero on any paid plan.