Time Tracking for Web Designers: From Timer to Paid Invoice Without Spreadsheets

Tracking time is easy. Turning tracked time into money is where designers lose hours of it: exporting reports, matching entries to requests, retyping totals into an invoice, and chasing the payment afterwards. Here is a workflow, built on a CRM with time tracking, that goes from a running timer to a paid invoice without a spreadsheet in between.

Where Billable Time Actually Goes Missing

Designers rarely under-bill because they forget to track big projects. They under-bill on the small stuff: the quick text change, the image swap, the "can you just" message on a Friday afternoon. Each one takes fifteen minutes, none of them feels worth opening a timer for, and by the end of the month they add up to a day of free work.

The fix isn't discipline. It's removing the steps between a request arriving and a timer running against it.

Before You Start: Set Your Hourly Rate

A timer only becomes money at a rate, so settle that first. Most designers choose between two approaches:

One account-wide rate, which keeps things simple and is right for most freelancers.

A rate per project, for the client on an older agreement, a discounted non-profit, or a retainer priced differently.

Bridge supports both. Set a default for your account and override it on any project that needs a different number. Whatever the rate, it's applied to exact tracked seconds, with no rounding up to the quarter hour behind your back. If you bill in blocks, that's your policy to apply, not the tool's.

Hourly or Fixed: Choosing Per Task

Hourly billing is fair for open-ended work, but it isn't right for everything. A few rules of thumb:

Bill hourly when the scope is unclear: debugging, content migration, "can you look into why this is slow".

Use a fixed price when the outcome is well defined: a new landing page, a set of product photos formatted and uploaded, a template customisation.

Mark it no charge when it's covered by the original project, or when goodwill is worth more than the invoice.

Making that call per task, rather than per client, is what lets you bill fairly without renegotiating the whole relationship every time the work changes shape.

Step 1: Capture Every Request as a Task

Time can only be billed against something. If requests arrive by email, text, and phone call, half of them never become anything you can attach time to.

Give clients one place to ask. With Bridge, that's the chat on their own Squarespace site. When they want something changed, they switch on Task Mode, click the element, and describe it. The request becomes a task automatically, pinned to the spot on the page with a screenshot of what they saw.

Step 2: Decide How the Task Is Billed

Before any work starts, decide what kind of task it is. Bridge gives every task one of three answers:

No charge, for fixes that are covered by the project or simply a favour.

Fixed price, when you and the client agree a number up front.

Hourly, billed at your rate from the time you track.

Setting this at the start means there's never a conversation about whether something was billable after the work is done.

Step 3: Press Play When You Start

Hourly tasks have a play button right in the task list. Press it when you start and the timer runs against that task, with the clock counting beside it.

Only one timer runs at a time. When you move to a different task and press play, Bridge stops the first timer and saves its time, so you never bill one hour to two clients. The timer also sits in the widget header and your dashboard, so it follows you whichever screen you're on.

Step 4: Stop, and It's Logged

Press stop and the session is saved to the task immediately, with a confirmation of exactly how much time was logged. There's no separate save, no timesheet to submit, and nothing to export.

Come back to the task tomorrow and press play again. Each session adds to the task's running total.

Step 5: Turn Time Into a Price

When the work is done, Bridge suggests a price from the task's tracked time at your hourly rate. Apply it with one click. Your rate can be set for your whole account or overridden for a specific project, for the client who's on a different rate.

Bridge never changes a price by itself. The figure is a suggestion until you apply it, so a number you set deliberately is never overwritten by a stopwatch.

Step 6: Get Paid on the Client's Site

Once a task is priced and billed, your client pays for it through Stripe from the same chat they used to request it, or from their client portal. The money goes to your connected Stripe account. There's no invoice PDF to create and no payment link to send by email.

When the payment lands, the task is marked paid, and its tracked time is locked so the record your client paid against can't change afterwards.

Fixing Mistakes

Everyone leaves a timer running over lunch eventually. Bridge keeps every time entry, not just the totals, so you can see when each session started and ended and discard one that shouldn't count. The task's hours update to match.

What This Replaces

A typical freelance billing stack for web design looks like this:

Email or messages for client requests

A project board for tracking them

A time tracker for the hours

A spreadsheet to match hours to requests

An invoicing tool for the bill

A payment processor for the money

Six tools, five hand-offs, and every hand-off is a place where time goes unbilled. Bridge keeps all six steps on the client's own Squarespace site. For more on why that matters, see our guide to choosing a CRM with time tracking.

Common Questions

Does the client see my timer? Clients see the task, its status, and its price. The timer is your working tool.

What does Bridge charge on payments? Bridge takes a 2% fee on client payments on the Link and Connect plans, and 1% on Atlas, alongside Stripe's own processing fees.

Can I track time on work that isn't a task yet? Yes. Start the timer from the widget header, choose "New task", and describe the work. The task is created and the timer starts in one step.

What does it cost? Link is $19 a month for five client sites, Connect is $39 for 25, and Atlas is $99 for unlimited. Every plan includes the work timer, with a 14-day free trial. See pricing for the full comparison.

Stop Losing the Small Hours

Good time tracking for web designers isn't about a better stopwatch. It's about making sure every request becomes a task, every task can be timed with one click, and every hour can be paid for without leaving the place it was asked for.

That's the workflow Bridge was built around: request, time, price, paid, all on your client's Squarespace site.