Hours to invoice, without rebuilding the month in a spreadsheet.
Accounting work fragments. A VAT query here, twenty minutes on a reconciliation there, a call about a letter from the tax office. Almost none of it is a neat block, and almost all of it is billable if you can remember it happened.
HourToBill is a timer with a client attached to it, and at month end the hours become a PDF invoice with every entry dated, described and priced. It is not practice management software, and that is the first thing to be clear about.
Due 30 September 2026 · Net 30
The problem is reconstruction, not tracking.
Nobody in this profession loses money because they lack a stopwatch. They lose it on the last day of the month, in front of a blank invoice, trying to remember what a Tuesday three weeks ago consisted of. The honest answer is usually "some of it", so the invoice gets rounded down, because absorbing an hour is easier than defending one.
Do that across five clients for a year at $90 an hour and the arithmetic is uncomfortable. An hour a week unrecorded is roughly $4,500 of work you did and did not bill for. That is the number this product exists to attack, and it is attacked by making the record accurate as the work happens rather than accurate afterwards.
The second half matters as much. Hours that never become an invoice are not revenue. So the entries you record are the lines on the document: same descriptions, same dates, same order, nothing retyped. The step where a CSV becomes a spreadsheet becomes an invoice is where the errors and the lost hours both live, and removing it is most of the value.
Rounding is handled where it matters. Set a client to 6-minute increments and four two-minute calls about the same matter on the same day bill as one 8-minute block, not as four full tenths. Rounding each entry separately would bill 0.4 hours for eight minutes of work. That difference compounds quietly across a year of fragmented days, and it is the kind of thing a client eventually notices.
Against the practice suites.
Karbon, Canopy, TaxDome and Practice Ignition are practice management systems that include time and billing. This is time and billing with nothing else attached. That cuts both ways and the honest comparison is short.
| What you get elsewhere | What you get here |
|---|---|
| Client portals, document requests, e-signatures, job and workflow pipelines. | None of it. A client, their rate, and the hours you worked for them. |
| Tax return tracking, deadline calendars and compliance job templates. | Absent. If your year is organised around filing deadlines, you need that elsewhere. |
| Bookkeeping and a general ledger, or a deep integration with one. | Absent. This never touches your books or your clients’ books. |
| Priced per user per month, with billing usually on a higher tier. | $12 a month, one plan, one person, nothing gated behind a tier. |
| An onboarding call, a migration and a week of setup. | An email address and about five minutes to your first invoice. |
Read this before you subscribe.
This does not do bookkeeping. There is no ledger, no chart of accounts, no bank feed and no reconciliation. It records hours and turns them into an invoice. Your books stay wherever they already are.
It does not track jobs, deadlines or filings. If the shape of your practice is "forty returns due in January", a workflow tool is what you actually need and this will not replace it. What it replaces is the spreadsheet you use for the advisory and ad-hoc work that sits alongside those returns.
It has no client portal and no document exchange. Invoices go out as PDFs you send yourself, by email, from your own address.
The person this fits is a sole practitioner or a small bookkeeping practice billing hourly to clients who pay on a normal invoice, who currently reconstructs the month from memory and a calendar. If that is not you, one of the suites above is the right answer and this page is not trying to argue otherwise.
Before you buy.
Can I set a different hourly rate for each client?
Yes. Every client has its own rate and its own currency, and the rate is stored on the invoice at the moment you issue it. Raise a rate in April and the March invoice still says what it said in March.
Does it bill in six-minute increments?
Yes, per client. You can also use 15, 30 or 60 minutes, or bill to the exact minute. The rounding is applied to the merged daily total for a task rather than to each entry, so a day of interruptions bills as the work it was.
Does it do bookkeeping or connect to my accounting software?
No to both. There is no ledger and no integration. It records billable time and produces an invoice PDF plus a CSV of the lines, which you can file or import wherever you keep your own records.
Can I bill some work at a fixed fee instead of hourly?
You can add an entry by hand with any duration, which covers a fixed fee expressed as hours. There is no separate fixed-fee line type, so a practice that is mostly fixed-fee will find this a poor fit.
What happens to work I do not want to bill?
Track it and leave it off the invoice. Unbilled entries stay visible in the month view, which is also the honest way to see how much non-billable time a client is actually taking.
Can I try it without signing up?
Yes. The demo runs the whole product in your browser, including downloading a real invoice PDF, with no account and no email address.