Time tracking for consultants who bill the messy real world.

Hourly retainer: client buys N hours per month at rate X. You track time, invoice monthly for the tracked hours (up to N), and over-run is either billed at the same rate or rolled to next month per the contract.

Project hourly: client agrees to a project at rate X, no hour cap. You track time, invoice on milestone or monthly, the project ends when the work ends.

Fixed-fee project: agreed price for an agreed scope. Tracking is still useful — you want to know your effective hourly rate after the project ends — but it doesn't drive the invoice. The invoice is the fixed fee, paid on a schedule.

All three coexist on the same client roster. A good time tracker stores rate per project (not per client), so the same client can have an hourly retainer at $200/hr and a fixed-fee engagement at $0/hr (non-billable tracking, billed via flat-fee lines) under the same client record.

The common mistake is storing rate on the client record. Then every project for that client inherits the same rate, and you end up with awkward workarounds when reality is more nuanced.

Better: rate lives on the project. Client A's retainer is one project at $200/hr. Client A's strategic-advisor engagement is a separate project at $300/hr. Same client, different projects, different rates — no awkward workarounds.

Hoursmith stores rate per project with an optional default rate at the client level (for new projects). Override per project; the per-project rate is what hits invoices.

Consulting work is interrupt-driven. You're on a strategy call, then back to writing, then on another call. The cadence that survives this: log time at the end of each call or each writing block, not at the end of the day. The 'reconstruct the day from a calendar' habit fails.

Park the log-time action next to an existing habit. End of call → log call. End of focused writing block → log it before the next call. This is faster than the friction of trying to remember at 5pm what happened at 10am.

Reserve 10 minutes Friday afternoon (or Monday morning, your call) to walk back through your calendar and inbox, looking for client work you forgot to log. Most weeks you'll find 1-3 entries. Worth it.

While you're at it, sanity-check the math. Total billable hours for the week / total work hours = your utilization rate. Most consultants target 60-75%; consistently lower means either marketing pipeline is weak or you're under-billing for admin/sales time.

End of month: one invoice per client, even if that client has three active projects. The invoice should group by project so the client can read 'retainer: 18.5h × $200 = $3,700' and 'strategic advisor: 4.25h × $300 = $1,275' on separate sections.

Layer flat-fee lines for fixed-fee engagements that hit milestones this month. Hoursmith's invoice builder handles this in one pass: pick the client, optionally filter by project, layer manual lines, send.

Scope creep is a fact of consulting. The work expands beyond what was scoped; the question is whether you bill for the expansion. Two patterns work.

Pattern A: hourly retainer with overage. The contract says 'N hours included, any overage billed at the same rate.' Track everything, invoice for what was tracked. Scope creep just shows up as higher invoiced hours — and the client knew that's how the deal worked.

Pattern B: fixed-fee with change-order. The contract says 'this scope for this fee.' When the scope changes, you propose a change-order (extra fixed fee or hourly addition). Track the new work against the change-order project, not the original.

Either pattern beats 'absorb the overage silently and resent it' — which is the third pattern and the most expensive one.