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Non-billable time, the invisible half of your job

When you bill a client five hours, you've often worked eight. The other three show up nowhere on an invoice, but they exist, and forgetting them puts your business at risk.

Everything you don't bill

When you bill a client five hours, you've often worked eight. The other three went into prospecting, emails, writing the quote, bookkeeping, a trip, some training. That time appears on no invoice, but it's very real, and over a week it adds up.

Why ignoring it is dangerous

If you calculate your rate as if you billed forty hours a week, you're actually paying yourself much less, because a good chunk of your time is never billed. All that invisible work has to be covered by the price of your billable hours. Otherwise, you work at a loss without even realising it.

Factoring it into your rate

A good rate starts from your genuinely billable hours, not your total time. That's exactly what VUED does: it builds in the fact that part of your week isn't billable, so your hourly price covers your whole activity, not just the hours you sell.

Reduce it a little, accept it a lot

You can save time with quote templates, good tools, well-honed processes. But non-billable time will never disappear completely, it's part of the job. Better to plan for it and bill it indirectly than to discover it while looking at your real income at the end of the year.

To put a number on all of this: calculate your freelance hourly rate in seconds.