Two hours here, three hours there. At the end of the month only what was written down counts.

A process that gets by without ballast

If you sell your own work, you do not need a system built for a hundred employees, but a process that holds up every day and asks no more than a few minutes.

In Jobtura the job is the working document. It runs through the stages from enquiry to quote to order and invoice, without anything being retyped along the way.

A service is a line item type of its own. It is priced by time or as a flat rate, and both may sit side by side in the same job.

You start small. One person, one customer, one order are enough for the first run.

An hour always belongs to somebody

A developer spends the morning on one customer project and the afternoon on a second. A consultant splits her day across three clients. By the evening the split is only roughly known.

The hourly rate sits on the customer or on the project. The same hour is therefore priced differently depending on the order, without anyone doing the maths before the invoice.

If you forgot to start the timer, you enter the time afterwards and correct it. What matters is that in the end nothing is missing that should be paid for.

With fixed prices the comparison is what counts: the calculated budget on one side, the booked hours and costs on the other. After that you know whether the next price has to look different.

Sections, equipment, unpaid invoices

An order that runs for months is structured with subgroups. Every section carries its own hours and its own budget.

What gets invoiced is the section that is finished, not the whole order at once. The invoice matches what was recorded in hours and services.

If equipment is part of it, it is held individually and assigned to the order. After the assignment it is clear what came back and what stayed with the customer.

Incoming payments are matched to the open items. If an invoice is left lying, a payment reminder and a dunning letter follow from the same job.