Free timesheet template

Write down the real minutes and let the sheet work out what is billed. In six-minute increments every started unit counts: 8 minutes bills as 0.2 hours, 20 minutes as 0.4 and 43 minutes as 0.8. The template keeps the minutes in one column and the billed hours in the next, so both are on record. Pick 5, 10 or 15 minutes as the billing unit instead, rounded up or to the nearest, or exact minutes, and the formulas follow.

The difference adds up. The sample week above is 485 minutes of work, 8.08 hours exactly, and bills as 8.5 hours rounded up: 25 minutes more, or 125.00 at a rate of 300. That is normal in firms that bill in tenths, but the engagement letter should say so, and some clients' billing guidelines ask for rounding to the nearest unit instead. The billing increment chart shows every minute from 1 to 60 in both.

Excel stores a time as a fraction of a day, which is why the start and end are multiplied by 1440 to get minutes. That only works on real times: 9:00 typed into a cell formatted as text gives an error or zero. Keep the totals on the minutes or the billed tenths, never on a column of clock times, which starts again at zero after 24 hours unless formatted [h]:mm.

The weekly file has room for 25 entries and the monthly one for 120, each with the formulas already in every row. A biweekly sheet is the weekly file with the rows copied down, since the formulas follow.

For billable time a week is the longest a sheet should stay open. An entry written the same day is accurate to a few minutes; one rebuilt on Friday from the calendar loses the short calls and emails, which are exactly the entries that round up.

For Google Sheets, download the Excel file and use File, Import; the rounding formulas work the same. The PDF is for paper: the column heads and empty lines to write on, in A4 or US Letter.

A paper or spreadsheet timesheet only holds what someone remembers to write down. Sixminute writes these entries itself, with client, matter, duration in six-minute units and narrative, for the lawyer to review and release to the billing system. To convert times by hand, use the minutes to decimal converter.