Time tracking and billing from WIP

Set staff rates, log time against work items, manage your WIP ledger and raise draft invoices billed straight from work in progress.

Recording time accurately and turning it into invoices is where a lot of practices lose money. Hours go unlogged, work in progress sits uninvoiced for months, and write-offs creep up without anyone noticing. Finye links time tracking, the WIP ledger and invoicing so that every billable hour can be traced from the moment it is logged through to a paid invoice. This guide walks through the full workflow, from setting up rates to billing from WIP.

Before you start: set up staff rates

Time only becomes money once Finye knows what each person's time is worth. A practice principal or administrator should configure rates before staff begin logging.

Open Settings and find the staff rates area.
For each team member, set their charge-out rate (the rate billed to the client) and, optionally, their cost rate for internal profitability reporting.
Save. New time entries will pick up the rate that applies on the date the work was done, so future rate changes will not retrospectively alter historical entries.

If you bill some clients at agreed fixed fees rather than hourly, you can still log time against their work. The time accumulates in WIP and you decide at billing time how much to invoice.

Step 1: Log time against a work item

Time in Finye is always recorded against a work item, so every entry is tied to a specific client request or job. This is what makes the WIP ledger meaningful.

Logging time as you work

Open the relevant work item from your board or list view.
Find the time tracking panel on the work item and add a new entry.
Enter the duration, the date the work was performed, and a short description of what you did. The description is important because it can appear on the client's invoice.
Mark the entry as billable or non-billable. Non-billable time (for example, internal admin or rework) is still recorded for reporting but will not flow into an invoice.
Save the entry. Finye applies the staff member's charge-out rate automatically and adds the value to the WIP ledger.

Encourage staff to log time daily rather than reconstructing a week from memory. Accurate, contemporaneous notes make the eventual invoice far easier to defend if a client queries it.

Step 2: Understand the WIP ledger

Work in progress (WIP) is billable time and costs that have been recorded but not yet invoiced. Finye keeps a running WIP ledger so you always know how much unbilled value is sitting in the practice.

Open the WIP area from the main navigation.
Review the ledger by client, by work item, or by staff member. Each line shows the accumulated billable value waiting to be invoiced.
Use this view at month end to spot work that has been sitting unbilled for too long, or clients whose WIP is growing faster than expected.

Keeping an eye on the ledger is the single most effective habit for improving cash flow. WIP that is never reviewed is WIP that quietly turns into a write-off.

Step 3: Bill from WIP

When a job is ready to invoice, you do not retype the time entries. Finye builds a draft invoice directly from the WIP ledger.

From the WIP view, select the client or work item you want to bill.
Choose the WIP entries to include. You can bill all outstanding WIP for that client or pick a subset, which is useful when you want to invoice a completed job while leaving in-progress work in WIP.
Finye generates a draft invoice with the selected entries totalled at their charge-out value.
Review the draft. You can adjust the amounts, edit line descriptions and group entries into clearer invoice lines before anything is sent.

Applying a write-off or write-on

It is common for the billed amount to differ from the raw WIP value. If you agreed a fixed fee, or you simply cannot bill the full time, apply a write-off so the invoice reflects what the client will actually pay. The difference is recorded against the WIP, which keeps your profitability reporting honest. Less often, you may bill above WIP value (a write-on). Either way, the adjustment is captured rather than hidden.

Step 4: Finalise, send and get paid

Once the draft looks right, finalise the invoice. The billed WIP entries are marked as invoiced and removed from the outstanding WIP ledger, so the same time cannot be billed twice.
Send the invoice to the client. They can view and pay it through the client portal or the public pay page using Stripe or Square.
If payment is not made on time, payment reminders help you chase the balance without manual follow-up.

Building a reliable billing rhythm

The workflow above works best as a regular monthly routine rather than an end-of-quarter scramble. A simple cadence is: staff log time daily, the practice manager reviews the WIP ledger weekly, and billing runs are completed in the first few days of each month. Over time this shortens your lockup, reduces write-offs and gives you a clear picture of which jobs and clients are genuinely profitable.

To get more from this part of Finye, pair it with recurring work so that templated jobs such as quarterly BAS automatically create the work items your team logs time against. See our other how-to guides for setting up projects and recurring work, and for invoicing and payments in more detail.