Hourly consulting has a hidden tax, and it isn’t the arithmetic. It’s rebuilding the same invoice from scratch every month: re-typing your rate, guessing what you called that line item last time, hunting for the client’s email, then spending the following three weeks wondering whether to send a polite nudge.
Spend ten minutes setting it up once and every month afterwards takes about two. Here’s the whole loop — client, rates, invoice, reminders, payment — end to end.
1. Add the client (once)
Go to Clients → Add client. Name and email are the two that matter: the email is where every invoice and reminder will go, so get the accounts-payable address rather than your day-to-day contact if the company has one.
Then set payment terms — the single highest-leverage field on the page. Net 15 versus Net 30 is two full weeks of cash flow, every single invoice, forever. Whatever you choose here becomes the default on every invoice for this client, so you never have to think about it again.
2. Save your rates as items
This is the step people skip, and it’s the one that makes everything after it fast. Go to Items → New item and create your rate as a reusable line:
- Name— what the client will read on the invoice, e.g. “Consulting — strategy”
- Description — optional detail that saves questions later
- Unit price — your hourly rate, not a project total. This is the whole trick: the rate is the price, and the hours become the quantity.
Create one entry per kind of work you sell, not per project. Most consultants end up with three or four:
- Standard consulting hour
- Discovery or workshop session (often a different rate)
- Rush / out-of-hours work
- Travel time, if you bill it
Two payoffs. Your rates stop drifting — no more discovering you quietly charged one client $140 and another $150 for the same thing. And your invoices become consistent, which quietly signals that you’ve done this before.
3. Track hours as you go
Use whatever you already use — a timer app, a notes file, a spreadsheet. Two habits matter more than the tool:
- Log the same day. Friday-afternoon reconstruction always under-counts, and it’s always your own hours you lose.
- Round consistently. Pick 15-minute or 6-minute increments and apply them to everyone. Consistency is what makes a bill feel fair.
Group your time by the rate it’s billed at, not by task. You want “18.5 strategy hours,” not eighteen separate entries — one line per rate is far easier for a client to approve.
4. Build the monthly invoice
At month end, hit New invoice and pick the client under Bill to. Your saved payment terms apply automatically and the due date fills itself in.
Now click Add from catalog and choose the rate you worked. The line arrives with the price already set — you just change QTY to the hours. Decimals are fine, so 12.5 is twelve and a half hours. Add a second line for a second rate.
Use the Note to customer field for the one thing an approver always wants to know: what period is this? Something like “Consulting services, 1–31 July” prevents a surprising number of “which month is this again?” emails.
Check the summary — subtotal, tax if you charge it, total — then Send invoice. Your client gets an email with a PDF attached and a link to view and pay it. No account, no login on their side.
5. Let the reminders do the chasing
This is the part worth automating, because it’s the part everyone avoids. Chasing money from someone you’ll work with again next month is genuinely uncomfortable, so it gets postponed — and a three-week-late invoice quietly becomes a six-week-late one.
In Settings → Reminders & late fees, switch on automatic reminders (available on Pro). Overdue invoices then get a sequence that escalates on its own — friendly first, then firm, then final — without you writing a word or deciding when. You can also add an automatic late-fee clause, which tends to work less by being charged than by being stated up front.
The relationship benefit is underrated: the follow-up stops being a personal decision you have to make and becomes a process the client understands.
6. Record the payment when it lands
If your client pays online by card, the invoice marks itself paid — you don’t touch anything.
For a bank transfer, cheque or cash, open the invoice and click Mark as paid, then pick how you were paid. That one click does three jobs: the invoice moves to Paid, any pending reminders stop, and the payment lands in your Payments ledger and reports.
Do this the day the money arrives. Skipping it is how people end up chasing an invoice that was settled a fortnight ago — the single fastest way to look disorganised to a good client.
7. Make next month one click
You never need to build that invoice from scratch again. Open last month’s and hit Duplicate invoice: the client, line items and payment terms all carry over, while the number, dates and payment link are new. Update the hours and send.
If the arrangement is a fixed monthly retainer rather than variable hours, set it up under Recurring instead and let it generate each month on its own.
The shape of it
Client and terms once. Rates in the catalog once. Then each month: catalog line, hours, send — and let the reminders handle the rest until you mark it paid. Ten minutes of setup buys back an afternoon a year and removes the most awkward conversation in freelancing.