Billing increments explained: 6, 15 or exact minutes?
Ask ten freelancers how they round their time and you will get exact minutes, six-minute tenths, and quarter hours. All three are defensible. What is not defensible — and is surprisingly common — is applying that rounding in the wrong place.
The three conventions
Exact minutes. You bill what the timer recorded. Transparent, and increasingly the default for developers and designers.
Six-minute increments (tenths of an hour). Standard in law and accounting. 0.1h, 0.2h, and so on. Fine-grained enough that the rounding barely registers.
Fifteen-minute increments (quarter hours). Common in consulting. Coarse, and where problems start.
The part that actually matters
Consider a day with six separate five-minute tasks for one client — a few emails, a quick call, a small fix. Thirty minutes of work.
Rounding each entry to the nearest quarter hour turns every five-minute task into fifteen minutes. Six of them bill as 1.5 hours.
Rounding the daily total takes the true thirty minutes and rounds once, to 0.5 hours.
Same convention, same data, three times the bill. At $110 an hour that is $110 of work invoiced as $165 — repeated across a month, it becomes the sort of discrepancy that ends a client relationship when someone finally checks.
Round late, round once
The rule: keep raw tracked seconds all the way through, sum them per project for the billing period, and apply rounding exactly once at the end.
This is how Clockd works and it is not configurable, because the alternative is a setting whose only function is to overbill clients. You choose the increment and whether to round to nearest or up; you do not choose to round every entry individually.
Which should you pick?
If your work is fragmented — lots of short interruptions, quick reviews, messages — use exact minutes or six-minute increments. Quarter-hour rounding on fragmented work inflates bills even when applied correctly, because the rounding error compounds against you or your client depending on direction.
If your work comes in long uninterrupted blocks, quarter hours are harmless. Rounding a 3-hour-52-minute session to 4 hours is noise.
Whatever you choose, put it in your contract. "Time is billed in six-minute increments, rounded to the nearest increment, calculated on the daily total per project" is one sentence, and it pre-empts the entire conversation.