A tutor's method for turning taught hours into an invoice
· 6 min read
Tutoring has a deceptively simple billing model: an hourly rate, and hours taught. Both numbers are known, so invoicing should be trivial.
It is trivial, and it is also why many tutors earn considerably less per hour of work than their rate suggests. The hours taught are not the hours worked, and only one of them is counted.
The unbilled half
For every hour in front of a student there is preparation. Finding or making resources. Reading the material the student is studying, particularly if you teach several syllabuses. Marking work between sessions. Messaging parents. Rescheduling, which for tutoring is constant.
Then there is the administration nobody chose: invoicing, chasing payment, keeping records for tax, and the enquiries that never convert.
None of it is billed. All of it is work. If you have never measured it, your effective hourly rate is unknown, and it is lower than your nominal one by a margin that surprises most people the first time they look.
Measuring it without adding admin
The obvious response is to log preparation time, which fails for the same reason timers fail generally: the logging is itself a task, and it gets skipped exactly when the week is busy.
Automatic tracking removes that. macOS knows which application is in front and for how long. A record built on that shows the browser at two hours, the word processor at ninety minutes, the video call application at four hours, without you remembering to start anything.
For tutoring, that maps unusually well onto the actual categories of work:
- The video call total is teaching time, checkable against your schedule.
- The word processor and browser totals are preparation and marking.
- Mail and messaging are parent communication and scheduling.
Two weeks of that answers the question that matters: how many hours of work does an hour of teaching actually cost you?
The calculation
Once you have real figures:
effective rate = total fees earned / total hours worked
Not hours taught. Hours worked, including preparation.
A tutor charging £40 an hour, teaching twelve hours a week, earning £480, and working twenty hours in total has an effective rate of £24. That is the number to compare against alternatives, and it is the number to use when deciding whether a new student at a lower rate is worth taking.
It also reframes a common decision. Taking on a student in a subject you have not taught recently looks like the same work at the same rate. It is not: the first several weeks carry much more preparation, so the effective rate for that student is considerably lower until you have built the materials. That is fine if you know it and price or plan accordingly, and expensive if you do not.
The reusable-materials effect
The encouraging half of the same arithmetic.
Preparation for a topic you have taught before is a fraction of preparation for a new one. So a tutor with a settled set of subjects and a library of materials has a much better effective rate than the hours-taught figure suggests, and one who takes on anything asked for has a much worse one.
Measuring makes that visible. If preparation time falls steadily for a subject over a term, your materials are working. If it stays flat, you are rebuilding the same thing each week, and an hour spent organising resources properly will pay for itself repeatedly.
This is the argument for specialising, made in numbers rather than in principle.
Where Punchcard fits
Punchcard sits in the menu bar, notices which application is in front by name only, and prints a receipt of the day at the closing time you set: one line per application, with a day total.
It needs no permissions, keeps no account, and has no networking code, so nothing about your working patterns leaves the Mac. That matters more in tutoring than it might appear, since students are frequently children and any tool recording window titles or taking screenshots is recording material about them.
What it will not do is know which student a block of preparation was for. There are no projects or tags. The allocation is a daily step you do yourself, which takes a couple of minutes with the receipt in front of you and is far more accurate than reconstructing a week on Sunday evening. Turning receipts into a simple invoice line covers making that step routine.
A practical weekly routine
Daily, two minutes. Look at the receipt and note which blocks were teaching, preparation and administration.
Weekly, five minutes. Total each category. Divide fees earned by total hours worked. Note the effective rate.
Termly. Look at whether preparation per teaching hour is falling. If it is not, that is where an afternoon of organising resources will pay for itself.
The Sunday roll covers keeping a weekly review going, and how to estimate hours for a quote covers pricing new work once you have real data.
Questions
Should I bill for preparation time? Some tutors do, either explicitly or by setting a rate that accounts for it. The second is more common and more palatable to families. Either way, you need to know the figure before you can price for it.
I teach in person, not online. Then teaching hours are not captured and preparation is. That is still the half you did not have, and you know the taught hours from your schedule.
What about travel between students? Not captured, and worth adding by hand. For tutors who travel, it is often the largest unbilled block, and it argues for grouping students geographically or by day.
Does this work for group classes? The measurement does. The arithmetic improves considerably, since preparation is shared across several paying students, which is exactly what the effective rate calculation will show you.