Most designers assume time tracking belongs to hourly billing. If you charge a flat fee, the thinking goes, the hours are already priced in. But when the Interior Design Community asked its members whether they track their hours, the answer from experienced practitioners was consistent: the data matters regardless of how you charge.
Here is the scenario that illustrates why. You finish a residential project. The client is happy, the photos are beautiful, and you feel like it went well. But somewhere in the back of your mind, a question lingers: was that project actually profitable?
If you don’t track your hours, you can’t answer that question with data. You can only guess. And guessing, especially when it comes to pricing your next project, is how designers end up doing more work than they’re being paid for.
That tension was at the center of a recent IDC Question of the Day: Do you or have you tracked your hours to know how long it takes you to work on your projects? Did you use a time tracker?
The responses from working designers covered everything from Harvest to handwritten time cards, from flat-fee firms to hourly billers, from solo practitioners to multi-person studios. What stood out wasn’t the tools. It was the consistency of the message: tracking your hours is a business fundamental, not a billing method.
Why Flat-Fee Designers Need to Track Hours Too
There is a common assumption that hour tracking only matters if you bill hourly. If you charge a flat project fee, the hours are already priced in. You don’t need to track what you can’t invoice.
That assumption is costing designers money.
Flat-fee pricing is built on an estimate of how long the work will take. But if you’ve never measured how long the work actually takes, that estimate is guesswork wrapped in a number. Over time, this leads to a predictable pattern: underpricing the phases where you spend the most time, overpricing the phases you’ve learned to streamline, and never quite understanding why some projects feel profitable, and others don’t.
This problem is most evident in concept development. It’s the phase where your expertise and creativity do their most intensive work, and it’s often the most undercharged because it looks effortless from the outside. Clients don’t see the hours of sourcing, rethinking, and refining that happen before a presentation lands on their screen. When you can’t see those hours either, the underpricing becomes structural.
“Tracking hours is the only way to validate your utilization rate. Without the data, you’re just guessing at your project fees. We track religiously so we can compare ‘Estimated vs. Actual’ hours at the end of each phase. It’s the difference between a project that feels successful and one that actually is profitable. If you aren’t tracking, you’re likely undercharging for the ‘Concept Development’ phase where the most value is created!”
@gen.decor.academy
Tracking hours makes the invisible visible. When you compare estimated time to actual time at the end of every phase, you learn something specific about your own firm and how it operates. That data is how you build flat-fee packages that reflect what the work actually costs you to deliver, not what you hoped it would cost when you were writing the proposal.
@mallorymathisoninc runs a firm that logs every hour in Harvest regardless of billing structure, including internal time for all the non-billable work that fills every week alongside client projects. The discipline applies whether a client is on an hourly billing or a flat-fee basis. The result is a clear picture of what every engagement actually requires.
The Non-Billable Hours Problem
Non-billable time is where profit quietly disappears. If you’re spending 15 hours a week on tasks that don’t appear on a client invoice, that’s 15 hours you need to account for when setting your fees or evaluating your capacity. The gap between what you bill and what you actually work is a number every design business owner should know.
Most designers underestimate how large that gap is. Admin, vendor coordination, sample research, business development, follow-up emails: none of these typically appear on an invoice, and most firms have only a vague sense of how much time they actually consume each week.
“Absolutely. For everything. Regardless of the fee structure it’s important to track your hours otherwise you have no data, no way to know how long things take and no way to know how productive your team is. We also track all the non-billable hours so I know how much time is spent on admin, vendor presentations, or just wasted time.”
@lsi_workshop
“Or just wasted time” is a phrase that doesn’t get enough attention in business conversations. Every firm has it. The question is whether you know how much you have and where it’s coming from. That knowledge is what lets you act on it, whether through delegation, process improvement, or simply accounting for that overhead when you set your project fees.
For firms with employees or contractors, non-billable tracking has a second purpose: productivity analysis. When you know how each person is spending their time across billable and non-billable work, you can identify where hours are stacking up and have a grounded conversation about what to do about it.
“100%. We bill hourly for our services so it is critical to the success of my business. Each employee also tracks admin time so we can calculate productivity rates. (Each role has a goal, including me as the owner.) Plus time tracking gives us data to evaluate how much time we spend on each phase of design and helps us estimate future projects. I don’t know how anyone can get by NOT time tracking!”
@cookdesignhouse
When every role has a productivity goal, you can have an honest conversation about where work is stacking up, whether a phase is consistently running over, and whether your fee structure is sustainable at your current volume. This is the kind of data that supports the broader work of pricing and profitability for interior designers. The hours you log become the foundation for every fee you set going forward.
Time Tracking as a Client Management Tool
There’s a less obvious benefit to tracking hours that came up in the IDC thread: using time data in real time with clients.
When a client stalls on a decision, drags out the selection process, or requests rounds of revisions that weren’t part of the original scope, the hours accumulate. If you’re not tracking, you feel the drag but can’t name it. If you are tracking, you have a number. And a number is a tool.
“I do but sometimes I forget. At the end of the day, I like the leverage it gives me when a client is taking forever to make a decision. I tell her/him we are at this amount of hours and we already spent 3 on this one item. I suggest we make a decision so we can move on to the rest.”
@julietaalvarez
This is a simple, low-friction way to redirect a stalled conversation. You’re not being adversarial; you’re being transparent. The data does the work without making the conversation feel confrontational.
It also sets a tone early in the relationship: decisions have a cost, even when they don’t result in a change order. For designers who bill flat fees, this is especially valuable because clients often assume that indecision is free. A well-timed hour count changes that assumption before it becomes a scope problem.
If you want to take this further, sharing a brief time summary at each project milestone keeps clients oriented and makes scope conversations easier later. It’s not about creating anxiety. It’s about giving clients the context they need to make decisions efficiently.
What the IDC Community Is Actually Using
The IDC thread surfaced a wide range of systems, and the takeaway isn’t that one tool wins. It’s that consistency matters more than sophistication. The designers who track well aren’t necessarily using the most advanced software. They’re using something, and using it reliably.
Harvest came up as the platform of choice for firms that want time tracking integrated with invoicing and reporting. It supports tracking across multiple projects simultaneously and reduces the administrative steps between logged hours and client billing. For hourly billers, especially, that integration saves real time each week.
Materio, a design-specific project management platform, includes built-in time tracking alongside procurement and project workflows. Several designers mentioned it in the thread, noting that having a good system is only half the work. @indigomavens noted: “We have a great system (Materio), but I’m so bad at doing it in real time. My team all does bc they’re hourly.” The tool doesn’t build the habit. You do.
myhours.com came up as a lighter, more accessible option for smaller firms or designers building a tracking practice from scratch.
“Our process involves flat fees for most design services and hourly fees for research prior to contract. We especially track hours in design collaboration with contractors, and I require my hourly employees to track time. Try myhours.com – they have a free trial. I ended up liking it and purchased it for my needs, and it has a paid team version that can be shared with team members, hourly employees or interns. It might help.”
@jsquaredhomedesigns
Visit myhours.com to start with the free trial. The paid team version makes it easy to extend tracking across employees and interns.
Several designers in the thread also reported relying on fully manual systems: physical time cards in project files, daily agenda notes, and phone logs, which were reviewed at billing time. @wowgreatplace has used a paper-based system for nearly 25 years, cross-referencing emails, texts, and call records to account for every hour. It’s labor-intensive, but it works and has worked for decades. @ruben_marquez has taken a different approach entirely, building a custom spreadsheet that tracks time by project and deliverable, with plans to layer in AI tools to automate the data collection.
The common thread across all of these approaches is intentionality. Whether the system is Harvest, myhours.com, Materio, a spreadsheet, or a handwritten log, the value comes from actually reviewing the data and using it to make decisions.
How to Start Tracking If You Never Have
If you’ve never tracked your hours, the goal isn’t to build a perfect system on day one. It’s time to start generating data.
Begin with one project. Track your hours by phase: design development, sourcing, client communication, admin, and installation coordination. At the end of the project, compare your estimate to what actually happened. That single comparison will tell you more about your pricing than any industry survey or benchmark figure.
If you have a team, start with billable hours and add non-billable tracking once the habit is established. Trying to capture everything at once is a reliable way to abandon the system in week two. Build from the core and expand from there.
For solo designers, even a note on your phone at the start and end of each work session builds a record you can use. It doesn’t need to be elegant. It needs to exist. You can refine the system later. The first priority is having something to look back at.
The designers in this IDC thread run firms of different sizes, bill differently, and use different tools. None of them wishes they had fewer data points. The consistent message is that once you start tracking, the idea of running a project without it no longer makes sense.
Most service businesses treat time tracking as a basic operational tool, so standard that it’s almost invisible. Interior design is one of the few fields where the conversation about whether to do it at all is still happening. Based on the designers’ experience in this thread, the answer is clear: start with something simple, use it on the next project, and let the data show what your pricing has been missing.