Tenths of an hour, billed the way you agreed them.
Legal billing lives or dies on the increment. Six minutes is the unit, the narrative has to survive a client reading it line by line, and the arithmetic has to be right the first time.
HourToBill bills in 6-minute blocks per client, rounds the merged daily total rather than each entry, and turns the month into an itemised PDF. It does not do trust accounting, which is the part you should read before anything else.
Due 30 September 2026 · Net 30
The increment is a feature, not a setting people remember.
Set a client to 6-minute increments and every entry against them is billed in tenths of an hour. The subtlety is where the rounding is applied. Round each entry separately and four two-minute calls on one day become four full tenths, which is 0.4 hours billed for eight minutes of work. Round the merged daily total for that task and the same four calls bill 0.2. The second is what you agreed with the client, and it is what happens here.
The narrative matters as much as the number. Each entry carries a one-line description written while the work was fresh, and those lines are what appear on the invoice, in date order, with hours and amount. A client reading down the page can see what a Tuesday consisted of without emailing to ask.
The document itself is snapshotted at the moment you issue it: the addresses, the rate, the tax rate, your logo. Raise your rate in April and the March invoice your client has on file still says what it said in March. For anything that might later be examined, an invoice that silently rewrites itself is a liability.
Against practice management suites.
Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther and Smokeball are practice management systems that include billing. This is billing with nothing else attached. That is a real difference in both directions.
| What you get elsewhere | What you get here |
|---|---|
| Matters, documents, calendaring, conflicts checking, client intake. | None of it. Time entries carry a client and a description, and that is the record. |
| Trust and IOLTA accounting with three-way reconciliation. | Absent. If you hold client funds you need a system that does this. See below. |
| LEDES and UTBMS task codes for insurance and corporate billing guidelines. | Absent. Invoices are plain PDFs, not LEDES files. |
| Priced per user per month, usually with billing on the higher tiers. | $12 a month, one plan, one person, nothing gated. |
| An implementation, a data migration and a training session. | An email address and about five minutes to your first invoice. |
Read this before you subscribe.
There is no trust account, no IOLTA ledger and no three-way reconciliation. If you hold client money, your bar’s rules almost certainly require records this product does not keep, and using it as your billing system would not put you in compliance. That is not a gap we plan to close: it is a regulated domain and doing it badly would be worse than not doing it.
There is also no LEDES export and no UTBMS task coding, so if you bill insurers or corporate clients to their guidelines, their systems will reject what comes out of here.
The person this fits is a solo practitioner or a consulting lawyer billing hourly to clients who pay on a normal invoice, who does not hold funds in trust, and who is currently doing the month end in a spreadsheet. For that person the increment handling and the itemised narrative are the whole point. For anyone else, Clio is the right answer and this page is not trying to talk you out of it.
Before you buy.
Does it bill in tenths of an hour?
Yes. Set 6-minute increments on the client and every entry against them is billed in tenths. You can also choose 15, 30 or 60 minutes, or bill to the exact minute.
Does it do trust accounting or IOLTA?
No. There is no trust ledger and no three-way reconciliation. If you hold client funds you need a practice management system that does this properly, and you should not rely on this product for it.
Can I export LEDES files?
No. Invoices are PDFs, plus a CSV of the lines. Insurance and corporate billing guidelines that require LEDES are not supported.
Can I track time to a matter rather than a client?
There is one level, the client. Many solo practitioners use one client record per matter, which works, though it means the client’s address is repeated. If you run many matters per client, this will feel thin.
How is the narrative shown to the client?
Each line shows the date, your description, the hours to two decimals, the rate and the amount. Entries with the same description on the same day merge into one line, so a task split across the day reads as one item rather than four.
Can a client pay from the invoice?
Yes, using your own payment link. We never hold or route the money, which also means we are not a factor in any question about client funds.