What's on a Timeslip? Includes a Free Timeslips Template
If your business makes money based on time, timeslips are not optional. They are the foundation of accurate billing, clean reporting, and ultimately, profitability. Most companies either misunderstand what a timeslip needs to contain or manage them poorly enough that the data becomes useless by the time an invoice needs to go out.
This guide covers exactly what a timeslip is, every field it needs to include, how billable versus non-billable time works, the mistakes that cause revenue to leak, and a free interactive timeslip template you can fill out and copy directly from this page.
What Is a Timeslip?
A timeslip is a record of time spent on a specific task, client, job, or project. It captures who did the work, what was done, when it was done, how long it took, and who it should be billed to. It is the smallest unit of billable work in any service business -- the building block that everything else depends on. Accurate timeslips produce accurate invoices. Inaccurate or missing timeslips produce billing disputes, underbilling, and margin erosion that compounds over time.
The difference between a business with a working timeslip system and one without it is the difference between knowing where your revenue comes from and guessing. Instead of "worked 8 hours today," a timeslip says "2.5 hours on Client A website design, 1.5 hours on Client B revisions, 4 hours on internal planning." That level of specificity is what turns recorded time into invoiced revenue.
What a Timeslip Must Include
A complete timeslip needs eight fields. If any of these are missing, the record is incomplete and will create problems at billing or reporting time.
| Field | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Employee Name | Identifies who did the work for payroll and billing attribution |
| Date | Required for billing periods and audit trails |
| Start Time / End Time or Total Hours | Start/end is more accurate; total hours is acceptable if consistent |
| Client or Project | Determines who gets billed and which budget is charged |
| Task Description | Specific enough to defend on an invoice if a client questions it |
| Billable / Non-Billable | Required to separate revenue-generating time from overhead |
| Hourly Rate | Optional but enables automatic invoice calculation |
| Approval Status | Unapproved timeslips should not flow to invoices |
Billable vs Non-Billable Time: Why Getting This Wrong Is Expensive
Not all time should be billed to clients. But if you do not separate billable from non-billable time explicitly in every timeslip, your reporting becomes useless and your margins disappear without a clear explanation.
Billable time is work that can be charged directly to a client: project deliverables, client-facing meetings, direct service delivery, consulting calls. Non-billable time is internal overhead that cannot be charged out: internal team meetings, training, administrative tasks, business development, and time spent fixing your own mistakes.
If your team logs 40 hours in a week and only 25 of those are billable, your effective utilization rate is 62.5 percent. You need to know that number to price accurately, staff correctly, and understand whether projects are actually profitable. A business that tracks total hours without the billable designation has a revenue reporting system that tells them almost nothing useful.
How Timeslips Turn Into Revenue
The revenue flow from a timeslip system has five steps. A break at any point causes errors that compound downstream. The employee logs the timeslip with all required fields at the time the work is done. The manager reviews and approves it before the billing period closes. Approved billable hours are pulled into an invoice for the relevant client. The invoice goes out to the client. Revenue is collected.
The most common break points are at step two (approval gets skipped because the process is manual and time-consuming) and between steps two and three (approved time has to be manually re-entered into an invoicing system, introducing errors and omissions). The goal of a well-built timeslip system is for approved billable time to flow directly into invoices without any manual reconstruction. Every manual step in that chain is a place where hours get lost.
Free Interactive Timeslip Template
Fill in the header details and add time entries below. Totals calculate automatically. Copy the completed timeslip to paste into an email or document.
⏲ Timeslip Builder
Add entries, set billable status and rates, copy when done.
| Task Description | Start | End | Hrs | Billable? | Rate | Amount | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.00 | $0.00 | ||||||
| 0.00 | $0.00 | ||||||
| 0.00 | $0.00 |
The Excel and Google Sheets Formulas
If you are building this in a spreadsheet, two formulas handle the core calculations. To calculate total hours from start and end time entries:
=(EndTime - StartTime) * 24
Format the result as a number, not as a time value, or the calculation will produce a decimal fraction of a day rather than hours. To calculate the billable amount:
=TotalHours * HourlyRate
Add an IF statement to zero out non-billable entries automatically:
=IF(BillableCell="Yes", TotalHours * HourlyRate, 0)
Common Mistakes That Kill Timeslip Value
Logging time at the end of the week. This is the most expensive mistake in time-based billing. People forget details. Hours get estimated or rounded. Task descriptions become vague. "Client work -- 6 hours" that was logged on Friday afternoon from memory is not the same as four specific timeslips logged in real time throughout the day that add up to the same number. The first one will not survive a client billing dispute. The second one will.
Vague task descriptions. "Meeting" and "project work" are not task descriptions. They will not hold up when a client questions a line item on an invoice. Every timeslip description should be specific enough that someone unfamiliar with the project could understand what was done and why it was billable. "Homepage wireframe revisions per feedback from 6/10 call" is a task description. "Design work" is not.
No approval process. Timeslips that flow directly to invoices without manager review will produce billing errors. A manager review step catches entries with missing fields, incorrect client attribution, vague descriptions, and hours that were not actually authorized. Unapproved time should not generate an invoice line item.
Mixing billable and non-billable without designation. If employees are not required to designate every entry as billable or non-billable, the data cannot be used for utilization analysis, pricing accuracy, or profitability reporting. Make the designation a required field with no blank option.
Too many categories. If the client/project taxonomy is complicated enough that employees are not sure which category to select, they will guess or skip the field. Keep the structure flat: Client, then Project under the client, then the task description free-form. Three levels is the maximum before adoption drops.
When to Move Beyond Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets work when you have one or two people tracking time for a small number of clients. They stop working -- and start costing more than they save -- when multiple employees are logging time simultaneously, you are managing more than three or four active clients at once, the approval process requires chasing people down manually, you are rebuilding invoice data by hand from spreadsheet rows, or you have no real-time view of billable hours for the current period.
At that point the spreadsheet is not free -- it is consuming management time that is worth more than the cost of a system that connects timeslips directly to approvals, invoices, and payroll. Updoot's time tracking and invoicing lets employees log time against specific clients and jobs from any device, managers approve or flag entries before they close, and approved billable hours flow directly into invoices without any manual reconstruction. The timeslip becomes the beginning of the revenue chain, not a standalone record that has to be manually translated into money.
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