Capture the six minutes while you still remember them.
The billable hour is lost in small pieces. A three-minute call taken between meetings, ten minutes reading a contract on a phone, the letter you drafted at nine at night. Reconstructed on the last day of the month, most of it is gone.
HourToBill keeps a timer against a client with a one-line note attached, and turns the month into an itemised PDF. It rounds in tenths, it keeps your narrative, and it does no trust accounting at all.
Due 30 September 2026 · Net 30
Capture beats recall, and it is not close.
Studies of timekeeping in professional practice put the gap between contemporaneous entry and end-of-day reconstruction at meaningful double digits. You do not need the study. Ask yourself what last Wednesday afternoon consisted of, and notice that the honest answer is a shrug and a downward rounding.
Downward rounding is the tax you pay for a bad record. It is invisible, it never appears on a report, and at 200 dollars an hour it does not take many shrugs a week to become a five-figure year. The fix is not discipline, it is making the record cheap enough to keep at the moment of the work.
Where the rounding is applied decides whether the client is billed fairly. Four two-minute calls about one matter on one day are eight minutes. Rounded per entry at tenths they bill 0.4 hours. Rounded on the merged daily total they bill 0.2. Both are defensible as policy, only one matches what most clients believe they agreed, and the second is what happens here.
The narrative is the other half. Each entry carries a description written while the work was fresh, and those lines are the invoice, in date order, with hours and amount. A client reading down the page can see what a Tuesday was without emailing to ask, and an invoice that is not queried is an invoice that gets paid on time.
Against practice management.
Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther and Smokeball are practice management systems with timekeeping inside them. This is timekeeping and an invoice, with nothing else attached.
| What you get elsewhere | What you get here |
|---|---|
| Matters, documents, calendaring, conflicts checking, client intake. | A client, a rate, an entry and a description. That is the whole record. |
| Trust and IOLTA accounting with three-way reconciliation. | Absent, deliberately. If you hold client funds, read the section below. |
| LEDES files and UTBMS task codes for insurance and corporate billing. | Absent. Invoices are PDFs, plus a CSV of the lines. |
| Per user per month, with billing often on the higher tier. | $12 a month, one plan, one person, nothing gated. |
| An implementation, a migration and a training session. | An email address and about five minutes to a 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 system of record would not put you in compliance. That is not a gap we intend to close.
There is no LEDES export and no UTBMS coding, so if you bill insurers or corporate clients to their guidelines, their systems will reject what comes out of here.
There is one level of grouping, the client. Practitioners with many matters per client often create one client record per matter, which works but repeats the address.
The person this fits is a solo practitioner or consulting lawyer billing hourly to clients who pay a normal invoice, who does not hold funds in trust. For everyone 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 per client. You can also use 15, 30 or 60 minute increments, or bill to the exact minute. The rounding is applied to the merged daily total for a task rather than to each entry.
Does it do trust accounting or IOLTA?
No. There is no trust ledger and no reconciliation. If you hold client funds you need a practice management system that does this properly.
Can I start a timer from my phone?
Yes. It runs in a mobile browser with no app to install, which is the point: a timer you cannot start in ten seconds is a timer you do not start.
What if I forget to start the timer?
Add the entry by hand with any duration, in whatever format you think in: 1:30, 90m, 1h 30m or 1.5. Reconstructing one entry is fine. Reconstructing a month is the problem.
Can I edit an entry after the fact?
Yes, until it is billed. Once an invoice is issued its lines are snapshotted, so an issued invoice never silently changes after the client has it.
How does this differ from your invoicing page?
Same product. That page is about the document at the end of the month; this one is about capturing the work during it.