Time Rounding is a powerful feature that ensures your time tracking aligns precisely with standard industry billing practices, helping you capture every minute of billable effort and maximize revenue.
1. What is Time Rounding and Why Use It?
Time Rounding is a mechanism that automatically adjusts the duration of your time entries up to the nearest interval you define.
Common Usage: This feature is widely used in professional services like lawyers and accountants where billing is based on increments. For example, a common practice is 6-minute rounding (0.1 hours) where time entries are rounded to the next 6 minutes interval. So a 10 minute entry gets rounded to 12 minutes.
The math is simpler: Billing in 0.1 hour increments is mathematically simple. You can easily multiply the hours logged (e.g., 1.5 hours) by the hourly rate.
It’s easy to follow: It allows professionals to provide a breakdown of their work without the complexity of to-the-minute entries. Clients can see how much time was spent on specific activities (e.g., “Drafting document: 0.4 hours,” “Client call: 0.1 hours”).
Accuracy/Fairness: It strikes a balance. Six minutes is small enough to ensure that most work is captured and compensated for, yet large enough to avoid the administrative burden of tracking every single minute.
In MinuteShark we always store the original time tracked as well as the rounded value (“Billable” value), so you can always go back and understand how you spent your time. You’ll always be able to view both values if you choose to use this feature.
2. Configuring Time Rounding
Due to the financial implications of this feature, only workspace administrators have access to configure it.
Accessing the Settings (Admin Only)
These settings are only visible to Admin users in the workspace. You can access the configuration in two ways:
Navigate to the Billable Rates page > Configure from the side menu navigation.
Navigate directly from the Settings page.
Setting the Interval
By default, time rounding is off. To enable it, use the dropdown menu:
Standard Intervals: The dropdown allows you to select common industry intervals, such as 6 minutes (0.1h).
Rounding Logic Example: Selecting 6 minutes means all time entries will be rounded up to the next 6-minute interval. For example:
A 10-minute entry rounds up to 12 minutes.
A 13-minute entry rounds up to 18 minutes.
This applies similarly to other standard options like 15 minutes or 30 minutes.
Custom Interval: There is also a custom option where you can manually enter any specific time interval you want to round to (entered in minutes).
Setting a Currency
You must also set the currency that will be used for financial calculations:
Currency Field: Within these settings, there is a currency field for you to type in your desired currency symbol (e.g., $, USD, CAD, EUR, etc). This currency will be used in the reports and trackers features if you set up Cost Profiles for Billable Rates.
For more details on setting up rates and cost profiles, please refer to the: Billable Rates guide.
3. Viewing Rounded Time
Once time rounding is enabled, MinuteShark clearly indicates the difference between the actual time tracked and the billable time:
History Widget: You will see the rounded values appear under a tag labeled BILLABLE in your History widget.
Reporting: The Reports feature will automatically use these rounded values when preparing all reports.
Trackers: The Trackers feature will also utilize these rounded values for calculating revenue and profitability.
For details on how these rounded values are used in financial analysis, please check out the following guides: