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Design time is the part of an interiors job that most often goes unbilled, because nobody wrote it down. Time in the sidebar is where it gets written down.

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Two ways to log it

  • Start timer — at the bottom of the sidebar, from anywhere in Atelier. Runs while you work.
  • Add entry — after the fact, with start and end times you type in. This is most people, most days.

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The entry

Billable is on by default. Uncheck it for anything you are absorbing — a courtesy call, redoing your own mistake, an internal review. Left checked, it will eventually appear on an invoice.

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Writing a useful description

The description is what your client reads on the invoice line. Design work invites a question. Joinery elevations — master bedroom, revision 2 does not. Write it as though it will be read by someone deciding whether to pay it. It will be.

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The entries view

Range: Today · Week · Month · Custom. Above the list, two running figures — Total and Billable — so the gap between them is visible at a glance. That gap is your unbilled time. Search filters by description; the filter control narrows by project or billable status. Export produces a CSV of exactly what’s on screen — the same range and the same filters, never a different set. If the export covers more than one person’s time, it carries a Person column, so a team export tells you whose hours they are rather than just how many there were.
Log at the end of each day, not the end of the month. Reconstructing a fortnight from a calendar loses roughly a third of it, and the third you lose is always the small stuff — the calls, the emails, the site trip that took an hour longer than planned.

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Turning time into money

  • On an invoice, use Time entry to pull logged hours in as billable lines.
  • On a proposal with an Hourly or Mixed fee type, tracked time is what the fee is measured against.
The rate comes from whoever logged the hour: their job role’s rate, which a project can override for that role or replace with one flat rate for everyone. How hours are priced sets out the order. A project without a flat rate is not unpriced — it bills at role rates.

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From the assistant

Starting and stopping a timer is something Atelier’s AI can do directly — start a timer on the Birchwood project, stop my timer. Useful when you remember you are working before you remember to open the app.