Turning receipts into a simple invoice line
· 5 min read
A daily receipt gives you the length of each day; a one-line note gives you the client. A week of both becomes an invoice line in about five minutes: a date range, a number of hours, a plain description, a rate and an amount. No invoicing feature is involved, and none is needed for a freelancer with a handful of clients.
The bridge between a receipt and an invoice
A receipt and an invoice are different documents with a gap between them, and the gap is where most time-tracking setups get complicated. Trackers that try to close it fully need projects, clients, rates and an invoice template, and then they need you to pick the right project every time you start working, which is the step nobody keeps up.
The alternative is to let the receipt do only what a receipt does (record the day, honestly, without being asked) and to close the gap by hand with one line of text a day. It is less work than it sounds: the manual part is thirty seconds and the automatic part never needs attention.
What you need at the end of each day
Two things, and the second takes under a minute.
The receipt. Punchcard prints one at your closing time: each app that was in front during the day with its time, a total at the bottom, a stamp with the date. It has no timer to start, so every working day has a receipt whether you remembered or not. Seven of them make the week roll on Sunday, which lists each day with its total. What a week of workdays looks like as receipts shows the shape.
The daily line. A text file, one line per day: date, client, what was done, and if the day was split, roughly how. “Tue 18: Client A. Homepage revisions, sent v3. Whole day.” Or: “Wed 19: A until lunch (approvals), then B (proposal).” This is the part the receipt cannot know. Punchcard records app names only, never document names or window titles, and it has no client field, so the line is not optional if you invoice more than one client.
The receipt tells you how much; the line tells you for whom.
From a week of receipts to an invoice line
Do this on Sunday or Monday morning, when the week roll has printed.
- Open the week roll and the daily lines side by side. The roll lists the days and their totals. The lines list the clients.
- For each day, assign the total to the client on the line. Whole-day lines are simple: the total goes to that client. Split days need a judgment: “A until lunch” on an 8-hour day is roughly 4 hours to A and 4 to B. Be consistent about how you round, and round in the client’s favor when uncertain.
- Subtract the time that was not client work. Look at the receipt’s app lines. A day with an hour in mail and forty minutes in a messaging app probably had less than the total on the client, unless that mail was the client work. Take a reasonable fraction off, and use the same fraction every week so the invoices are consistent. Pick a fraction, use it every week, and the invoices stop needing explanation.
- Sum each client’s hours for the week. Write the number down next to a date range and a one-sentence description pulled from the daily lines.
- Multiply by the rate and write the line. That is the invoice line. Repeat per client.
- Keep the receipts and the lines. If a client ever asks where the time went, the week roll and the daily lines are the answer, and how to show a client where the time went shows how to present them.
The line itself
An invoice line built from receipts should read as a summary of evidence, not as a guess. The format that works:
Design revisions, homepage and pricing page, 18 to 22 August. 26.5 hours at 85/hour. 2,252.50.
Four parts, in that order: what was done (from the daily lines), when (the date range from the receipts), how much (the hours after rounding and subtraction), and the money. No app names, no minute-level breakdown, no mention of the tracker. The client does not need to know how you arrived at 26.5; they need to believe it, and a number with a half in it that sits inside a stated date range tends to be believed.
If the client wants more detail, give them the daily lines as a second page: date, hours, description. That is a timesheet, produced from the same two records, and it takes five more minutes.
Handling the awkward days
Mixed-client days. The daily line must say roughly how the day divided. If it does not, look at the receipt: a day with a design app in the morning and a document app in the afternoon often maps onto the two clients, and the time on each app line gives the split. When even that is unclear, split evenly and note it.
Late days. A receipt headed SORRY WE MISSED YOU means the day ran past closing time, and the total is the real one. Bill it if the client asked for the work; it is the hours that most often go unbilled otherwise. Overtime you didn’t notice is about these.
Days away from the Mac. A call on the phone, a site visit, a workshop. The receipt will show a short or empty day. The daily line carries the hours: “Thu 20: Client A, on-site workshop, 10 to 4.” Bill from the line.
Days with no line. If you forgot to write one, the receipt still exists, and Finder’s Date Modified on the client folders usually tells you whose day it was. Write the line late, and mark it so.
What Punchcard will not do
It is worth being plain, because people searching for time tracking to invoice often want the whole chain. Punchcard records which app is in front, prints the day, exports CSV and PNG, and stops there. It has no clients, projects, tags, rates, invoice templates or integrations with accounting software, and it will not gain them. It does not know which hours were billable. It cannot send anything anywhere; it contains no networking code at all.
If you need a tool that produces the invoice itself, this is not it. If you need an honest record of every working day that takes no effort to keep, and you are willing to write one line a day to say whose day it was, the invoice takes five minutes a week and the record behind it is complete. The post on time tracking for freelancers without projects or tags goes into why that trade tends to hold up better than the full chain.
Questions
Why not bill the full receipt total?
You can, if the whole day was that client’s and you are comfortable that the mail and browser time was part of the work. Most freelancers prefer to take a consistent fraction off, because an invoice that is slightly under the record is never questioned and one that is slightly over sometimes is. Either way, decide once and apply it every week.
What if I bill by the day rather than the hour?
Then the receipt total tells you whether a day was a day: if your terms define a day as up to eight hours and the receipt says eleven, it was more than a day, and your terms say what that costs. A day-rate freelancer’s guide to knowing the real day covers this.
Can I skip the daily line if I only have one client?
For the client split, yes. Keep a shorter version anyway, one phrase about what was done, because the invoice description comes from it and “18 to 22 August, 34 hours” with no description is the kind of line that gets a reply.
Does the CSV export help here?
For a month or a quarter it does: open it in a spreadsheet, add a column for client from your daily lines, and sum. For a single week, the printed roll and the text file are faster.