Guide
Logging hours is the easy part. The expensive part is everything between an entry and a paid invoice — and that part rarely fails because of formatting. It fails because the data lives in too many places, and someone is rebuilding it by hand at month-end.
Why this page exists
The five steps
An entry has to start tagged. The moment a designer or consultant begins billable work, the timer needs a client and a project attached — not a generic 'unsorted' bucket that someone will categorize next Friday. Late tagging is where most missing entries originate.
Billable vs non-billable. Project-level rate. Engagement model (hourly, retainer, or fixed-fee). Categorization shouldn't be a separate workflow on top of capture — it should fall out of how the entry was started in the first place.
Project leads or partners review entries before they become invoice line items. This is where idle time gets reviewed, where internal hours get marked non-billable, and where the audit trail for the client gets locked in. Skip this step and you ship invoices with surprises in them.
Approved hours convert to line items at the right rate, on the right template, with the right level of detail for the client. The work to build this should be 'review, then send' — not 'rebuild from a CSV export.'
Send the invoice. Accept payment. Mark paid. Close the loop. Stripe payment links handle the back half automatically when they're attached to the same record as the invoice — when they're not, someone is logging into a separate dashboard to reconcile.
Where admin sprawl actually comes from
Most billing operations don't fail at any single step. They fail at the handoffs between tools. A timer app feeds a spreadsheet that feeds an invoicing app that feeds a payment tracker. Every arrow in that chain is a place where someone re-enters data, applies a rate from memory, or forgets to update one system after updating another. The cost compounds quietly — and shows up as missed billables, delayed invoices, and AR reports that don't match the bank.
Hours come out as a CSV. Someone cleans it: fixes typos, drops non-billable rows, reassigns mistagged entries. Every cycle. Every spreadsheet is slightly different from the last.
The cleaned hours get re-entered as line items. Rates get re-applied (manually, from memory, or from a different spreadsheet). One transposition error, one wrong rate, and the client emails to ask why.
Sent invoices get tracked in a third system. Paid status updates by hand when Stripe or the bank confirms. AR reports rely on someone keeping all three systems aligned.
Recurring engagements need rate changes, scope adjustments, and rolled-over budgets. With three systems, that's three places to update — and one of them always lags.
What “connected workflow” actually means
When you set a project's rate, every entry tracked against that project carries it automatically. Contractors don't need to know it. Junior consultants don't need to remember it. The system applies it on capture.
Entries aren't free-floating CSV rows. They're records tied to a project, a client, and an engagement model. When the invoice gets built, the system already knows what to pull.
Draft invoices populate from approved entries. The work shifts from 'rebuild the data' to 'review and send.' What used to take an afternoon takes a few minutes.
Stripe payment links attach to the invoice. When the client pays, the same invoice marks itself paid — no second dashboard, no manual reconcile. AR is one screen, not three.
A concrete example
Monday morning. A designer starts a timer from the menu bar, tagged to the “Brand Kit” project for Acme Co. The project is set up with a $200/hr rate. No additional input required.
Wednesday. The designer steps away for a 30-minute meeting. Talix Time prompts on return: bill it or trash it? She marks it non-billable. The 30 minutes doesn't disappear — it stays attached as internal time.
End of week. The PM reviews entries. 5.5 hours of billable work approved. No CSV export, no spreadsheet — review happens on the same record where the timer ran.
First of the month. A draft invoice for Acme Co. is already populated: 5.5 hours × $200 = $1,100. The PM reviews, attaches a Stripe payment link, and sends.
Two days later. Acme pays via the Stripe link. The invoice marks itself paid. The project's AR view updates. Nobody logs into a second dashboard.
Where Talix lands
Talix isn't an integration between five tools. It's one workflow where projects, rates, tracked time, approvals, invoices, and Stripe payments live in the same data model. The five steps still happen — you can't skip approval or invoice review — but the handoffs between them stop costing you margin.