If you charge clients a fixed fee or work under a retainer arrangement, you can still track the actual time spent on the work. This gives you visibility into your real costs while billing the agreed amount.
This guide covers two common scenarios: billing a fixed price for completed work and marking prepaid work as invoiced without sending another Invoice.
Track progress with a Project Budget
Before you start working, set up a Project under your client's Contact for the fixed-fee or retainer work. See here for a full guide on creating a Project
Add a Budget to the Project using $ Billable and set the amount to match your agreed fee. This compares the billable value of your tracked time, using your billing rates, against the fee. It is not a measure of your actual costs. For an allowance measured in hours, choose Hours; this counts all logged time for the Project, including billable and unbillable time. See our guide on Goals/Budgets here for more info!
For a monthly retainer, set the Project Budget frequency to each month. Tracking resets on the 1st of each calendar month. Time counts in the period of its Time Entry date, even if you invoice it later. You do not need to create an Invoice to reset the Budget.
A recurring Budget resets its tracking for each period. It does not track payments or automatically carry unused prepaid hours or money into the next period. Uninvoiced work remains available for later invoicing; a Budget reset does not delete that work or settle a prepaid balance. Keep logging actual time against the relevant Contact and Project so you can report on the work performed.
If you're consistently going over budget, it may be worth reconsidering your pricing for future agreements.
Check this month's allowance and earlier uninvoiced work
Your current Budget and your uninvoiced work answer different questions:
Current Budget: how much time or billable value you have logged against this period's limit.
Uninvoiced work: time that has not been marked as invoiced, which can include earlier periods.
Prepaid balance: what your client has paid for and is still entitled to under your agreement. MinuteDock does not calculate this from a Budget or an uninvoiced total.
To find billable work still to invoice, including work from previous months:
Open Reports and filter to the relevant Contact and Project.
Choose All Time, or Specific Dates covering every period you need to include. A current-month range leaves earlier work out.
Under Options, select Include billable time only and Include uninvoiced time only.
See the work in progress report example for more detail.
For example, a Project with a 20-hour monthly Budget has 6 billable and 2 unbillable hours logged in November. Its November Budget counts 8 hours, leaving 12 hours before the monthly limit. If 4 billable hours from October and the 6 billable hours from November are still uninvoiced, a billable, uninvoiced report covering both months shows 10 hours. A November-only report shows 6 hours. Neither result tells you the client's remaining prepaid balance.
Leaving October entries uninvoiced keeps them available for later invoicing. It does not move their dates, add them to November's Budget, or automatically carry an unused allowance or an overrun into the new month. Record any carry-forward entitlement separately according to your agreement with the client.
Bill time against a fixed price item/project
When you've completed work with an agreed fixed fee, you can adjust the Invoice to reflect that price while keeping your time records accurate.
Go to the Invoices screen and start a new Invoice for your Contact
Select the Time Entries from your Project
Select the entries you want to include, then click Merge to combine them into a single Line Item
Set Hrs/Qty to 1 and Rate to the agreed fixed fee. Amount is calculated from Qty × Rate.
Update the description if you'd like it to reflect the fixed-price arrangement
Complete your Invoice as normal
ℹ️ Note: The Time Entries attached to this Line Item aren't affected by the change. Your time records stay accurate, showing the actual hours worked. Only the Invoiced amount changes.
When you send or confirm the Invoice, all the underlying Time Entries will be marked as billed.
Mark prepaid work as invoiced without sending
Confirm Without Sending creates a separate Invoice in MinuteDock. It marks the selected Time Entries as invoiced without sending that Invoice to the client or accounting software.
It does not link the completed work to an earlier prepaid Invoice, deduct from a prepaid balance, or reconcile the two Invoices. Both Invoices remain in MinuteDock. If you total both Invoice amounts, that can count the same agreed fee twice.
Before using this for prepaid work, check which Report you use to measure invoiced amounts and which system records the original prepayment. If you are unsure how the two records affect your Report, ask our support team to review the workflow before creating another Invoice.
To mark the selected Time Entries as invoiced without sending, follow these steps:
Go to the Invoices screen and start a new Invoice for your Contact
Select the Time Entries from your retainer Project
Format the Line Items as needed
Click the dropdown on the Send button and select Confirm Without Sending
Using the 'Confirm Without Sending' option will mark the time entries as invoiced without delivering anything to the client.
Your Time Entries are now marked as billed and won't appear in future invoicing suggestions.
The Invoice will still appear in your Sent Invoices list for your records. If you need to make the time available for invoicing again, you can delete the Invoice. See our guide on deleting/archiving invoices for more information
Send a retainer client a timesheet
Confirming an invoice without sending it marks the time as billed, but doesn’t give the client a record of the work.
To send them a timesheet, run a Report filtered to their Contact and the relevant period. Open the Download menu on the right, opposite Charts and Time Entries, and choose Timesheet (PDF). Select the columns you want to share, leaving Rate and Amount unticked to exclude dollar values. Click Generate, then click Download when the confirmation appears.
Video tutorial: Track time and bill for a fixed fee