Billable time, and why entries lock

Two things about time entries surprise people: that time can be marked billable, and that entries eventually stop accepting changes.

Billable time

The manual entry form asks What did you work on? and carries a Billable toggle. Billable means the hour is chargeable to someone else; non-billable means it was real work that nobody is paying for directly.

Track both. The temptation is to record only the billable hours, but then you cannot see the ratio, and the ratio is the interesting number. Knowing that a client absorbs three unbilled hours of coordination for every ten billed is the sort of finding that changes a price. Leaving the unbilled hours untracked simply hides the problem.

Be consistent about the boundary. Decide once whether internal meetings, travel or writing a proposal count as billable, and apply it every time, or the totals will not compare from one month to the next.

Entries lock after the due date

Once a task’s due date has passed, its time entries lock, and you will see Time entries are locked. Task due date has passed. Nothing is deleted; the record simply closes.

This exists because time records get used — for invoices, for reporting, for pay. A record that anyone can rewrite weeks later is not a record. The lock draws a line so that what was reported stays what was reported.

The practical consequence is a habit: log your time while the task is live. Same day is best, same week is acceptable, after the due date is too late. If you routinely find yourself locked out, the honest fix is usually a more realistic due date rather than faster catch-up.

What to do when you are locked out

Talk to whoever owns the task or the reporting instead of trying to work around it. The missing hours are a real fact and they matter to somebody — they simply cannot be added to a closed record on your own.