Rates, rounding, and targets
Set what your firm charges, how time rounds, and what each person is expected to bill.
Three settings that quietly determine what your firm bills. Set them before your first invoice, not after.
Where to find it
Rounding
Two settings, and together they change your revenue.
Increment — 1 minute, 6 minutes (0.1 hr), or 15 minutes (0.25 hr).
Mode — Round up or Nearest.
Six minutes is the traditional professional increment and what most firms expect. Fifteen is coarser and adds up faster. One minute is effectively no rounding.
The combination matters more than either alone. 6 minutes + Round up means a four-minute phone call bills at 0.1 hours. 15 minutes + Round up means the same call bills at 0.25. Across a season of short calls that is not a rounding error, it's a policy.
Rates
Per member:
Standard rate — what their time bills at.
Cost rate — what their time costs your firm. This is what makes realisation meaningful. Without it you know what you billed but not what it took, and a job can look profitable while losing money.
Cost rate is sensitive, and access to it is permission-gated separately.
Annual target (hrs) — expected billable hours for the year.
Some rates may show as locked, meaning they're set at a level you can't override from here.
Targets
An annual target turns "are we busy" into a number. It also makes the non-billable problem visible — someone hitting hours but missing target is doing work that isn't reaching an invoice, which is a scheduling problem rather than an effort problem.
Set targets that are honest. A target nobody meets is ignored within a month.
Service lines
Work is categorised into service lines, which is how billing reports become useful. Knowing you billed a certain amount is one thing. Knowing tax was profitable and bookkeeping wasn't is the thing that changes what your firm does next year.
Notes and limits
- Rounding applies at billing, not at entry. Your recorded time stays as recorded.
- Changing rates doesn't reprice time already invoiced.
- Cost rate is not shown to staff without the relevant permission.
- Rates are per member. Client- or job-specific pricing is handled separately.