Pomodoro and billing your time — how not to lose billable hours
Pomodoro sessions and an hourly invoice are two different accounts of the same day. How to reconcile them, so the client gets a fair bill and you do not give work away.
Anyone billing by the hour has two problems that look like one. The first is concentration: how to get through a day without scattering every ten minutes. The second is the record: what to actually put on the invoice at month end.
Pomodoro solves the first. For the second it can do harm, if taken uncritically.
Why the sum of your sessions is not your billable hours
Eight sessions of 25 minutes is three hours twenty. But there were breaks between them — seven short and one long, roughly fifty minutes. The day ran over four hours, and a little over three of it is billable.
That is as it should be. A break is not time you invoice for, and including it is the shortest route to a bill you cannot defend. The trouble starts when someone counts the other way: notes that they "sat down at 9 and got up at 1" and writes four hours.
The second trap is subtler. A session cut short after eight minutes because the phone rang is eight minutes, not twenty-five. If your record stores the planned length rather than the actual one, a month later you are holding several hours that never happened.
Three ways of billing, and what follows from each
Hourly. Simplest to calculate and most sensitive to record keeping. Here every unrecorded session is work given away. Record as you go: reconstructing a week from memory on Friday always undercounts, because nobody remembers the small fifteen-minute passes at a problem.
Fixed price per project. The record never reaches the invoice, which makes it more important rather than less: it is the only way to find out whether the price made sense. A project quoted at eight thousand that took a hundred hours paid eighty an hour — and it is better to know that before accepting the next one like it.
Monthly retainer. Here the record guards against scope creep. An agreement for "twenty hours a month" with nobody counting means thirty by the third month.
What to record for it to mean anything
Time alone is not enough. Three things together give a picture that none of them gives separately:
- What you worked on — because an invoice line has to mean something to the client, and "development work, 34 h" is an invitation to argue.
- How long it actually took — not how long it was meant to take.
- Whether it got finished — because that is the only field which, a month later, tells you which tasks keep turning out bigger than they looked. And better quoting comes out of exactly that.
The third is what a plain timer does not give you, and what decides whether a year from now you price better than you do today.
Tax follows revenue, not hours
Worth keeping straight: a time record and a tax record are separate things. The tax office has no interest in how many sessions you ran, only in the amount on the invoice. But one feeds the other — if your rate is derived from hours, an undercounted record is undercounted revenue, and with it an undercounted basis for what you should be setting aside for tax and contributions.
On business activity taxed on a scale or a flat rate there is a further layer: the base is income, so what matters is not only what you invoiced but also which costs fall in the same period.
Putting it together
- Start the timer before you begin, not after. Reconstruction always undercounts.
- Name the task the way you would name it on an invoice. You save yourself the translation two weeks later.
- Record the actual time, including when the session fell apart.
- Do not bill breaks. Keep them in the record, but apart.
- Move sessions into the project record weekly — after a month nobody can reconstruct them.
The pomodoro timer in Ordiarion records all three at once: the task, the actual time and whether it worked. With an account, a session goes into a work-log project in one click, and breaks never enter billable hours.
New to the method? Start with the introduction to the pomodoro technique.