2026-08-26

Bill by the hour, invoice from your books

Every time-tracking tool eventually grows an invoicing module, and every one of them is a worse invoicing tool than the accounting system you already pay for. We stop at the line items.

The workflow

1. People log time against a client, a project and a task. Rates are set per member and per project, with the date each rate took effect, so a rate change never rewrites last quarter.
2. Weeks are submitted and approved, if you use approvals. A payroll lock date keeps closed periods closed.
3. The billing export produces one row per line item: client, project, task, person, date, hours, rate, amount, in plain headers QuickBooks and Xero accept. Exporting records which entries went out, so the next export starts where the last one stopped.
4. Your bookkeeper turns the lines into draft invoices in the accounting system, applies tax and terms the way the books need them, and sends.

Why not invoice here

Tax handling, invoice numbering, payment terms, reminders, credit notes, currency, and the audit trail all live in the accounting system, and the accountant wants exactly one place for them. A second invoicing surface means two sets of numbers to reconcile. The Reddit threads about switching from Harvest are full of people discovering that a time tool’s Xero sync calculates tax differently from Xero. Sending line items instead of invoices sidesteps the whole problem.

What we do check

That the amounts are right. Reports and the export price every entry at query time from the rate history, never from a number stored on the entry, so a corrected rate corrects every report. After a Harvest import the reconciliation report proves the totals match the source before the first export goes out.