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Your hourly rate, from your own numbers

The rate you quote and the rate you earn are different numbers, and the gap between them is made of hours you tracked and never billed. If you have been tracking time, you can measure both today. There is no calculator in this repository that will do it for you, because the inputs are judgement calls and a tool that hides them behind a single figure would be lying about how confident it is.

Measurement one: what you billed

Give me invoice lines for Acme in August.

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invoice_summary on the time tracker returns one line per task with hours, rate and amount, plus a total. That total is billed revenue for the period. It is a Pro tool; the free report gives you totals in hours and money over the last 7 days, which is enough to sample a week and multiply.

Measurement two: what you worked

How many hours did I track last week across every project?

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report with no project filter. Compare it with measurement one. The difference is unbilled time, and for most people it is between a fifth and a third of the week. Whatever it is for you, it is the number that turns a 90 EUR quoted rate into something else entirely.

Measurement three: what it cost you to work

Expense summary for this month, grouped by category, excluding anything billable.

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expense_summary. Exclude the billable ones, because those are pass-throughs, not the cost of being in business. Software, hardware, the accountant, the desk. Free covers 30 days.

Putting them together

LineWhere
Billed in the monthinvoice_summary or report
less own costsexpense_summary, non-billable only
= what the month left you
divided by hours trackedreport, every project
= what an hour of work is actually worth

Two things this leaves out on purpose. Tax, because it depends on your jurisdiction and your structure and nothing here knows either. Unpaid invoices, because billed is not banked: statement_aging tells you what is still outstanding, and a month with a large receivable in it did not leave you what the arithmetic says.

Making the next measurement easier

project_set_rate puts a rate on a project so every entry prices itself. On the free tier two projects can carry rates, which covers the case where you want to compare your main client against everything else. Set the rate before you track, not after: an entry priced at zero and corrected later is a manual edit you will forget to make.

Free and Pro splits from data/facts.json. Eleven tools on the time tracker, counted from data/tools.json.

Questions

Why is invoice_summary a Pro tool when report is free?

The free tier clamps every read to the last 7 days, and an invoice summary over 7 days is not useful for billing a month. Grouping by project, day and task, and the money arithmetic itself, are free. The stated split is in data/facts.json.

What is a realistic utilisation figure?

This page will not invent one. Measure yours: tracked hours against billed hours for one month, from the two reports above. A figure you measured beats a benchmark somebody else's survey produced from a different market.

Should I track non-billable work?

Track it, on a project called something like admin. Otherwise the tracked total is only the billable part and the utilisation measurement above cannot be made at all. Timers are unlimited on the free tier, so the extra project costs nothing except the rate slot, and admin does not need a rate.

Can it tell me what to charge?

No, and nothing in this repository will claim to. What it can tell you is what you charged, what you worked and what it cost, which are the three facts every rate-setting method needs and most people are guessing at.

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