Most consultants send their invoices from memory. They think back over the month, try to reconstruct what they worked on, add up the hours, and send it.
That reconstruction is where the money disappears.
If you’re billing for professional time, the last five minutes before you finalize an invoice are worth at least as much as the work itself. Here’s the audit I run before every invoice goes out.
1. Check your calendar against your hours
Open your calendar for the billing period. Go day by day.
For every client meeting, call, or scheduled working block — does it show up in your time records? It should. A 30-minute call is 0.5 hours. A 90-minute strategy session is 1.5 hours.
Most people forget the short ones: the 15-minute check-in, the quick call to clarify something. Each of those is at least 0.2 hours. Three a week for a month is 2.5 hours. At $200/hr, that’s $500 you left out.
2. Check your email and Slack threads
Scan your sent messages for the billing period. Look for anything that looks like work: detailed answers to client questions, reviews and feedback, coordination that took real thought.
Email is where billable time hides. “Just a quick email” that took 20 minutes of research before writing is 0.3 hours. If you sent six of those this month, that’s two hours.
You’re not padding. You’re charging for the work you actually did.
3. Check for deliverables you didn’t bill as a line item
Did you review a document? Write a summary? Create a framework or a template? Prepare for a presentation?
These often don’t make it into time records because they happen between meetings and calls, without the natural prompt of a calendar event. Walk through your work product for the month and ask: is the time I spent making this showing up somewhere?
4. Check for client-specific scope creep
Some clients expand scope gradually, request by request. A question here, a favor there. By the end of the month, you’ve done several hours of work that isn’t attached to any project code.
Look at what you actually did for each client, not just what was on the statement of work. If you went beyond scope, decide now: is this something to bill, or something to address in the next scope conversation? Either way, make the decision consciously before the invoice goes out.
5. Do the math before you send
Add up all hours per client and multiply by your rate. Compare the total to what you expected the month to be worth.
If the number is significantly lower than expected, that’s a signal, not a coincidence. Either you had a lighter month than you realized, or there are hours that didn’t make it in. Figure out which before you send.
The ten minutes this takes usually finds at least an hour of missing time. At most professional billing rates, that’s a better return than almost anything else you’ll do this month.
If you’re tracking time in Fract, your time records are already in 0.1-hour increments — the same unit as your invoice. The math is clean. The audit is faster.
But even if you’re not, do the audit. Send the full invoice.
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