The billable hours I lose are never the big ones. They are the 20 minute revision rounds.

I freelance in 3D and motion. When I actually went back through a few finished jobs and compared what I invoiced against what I had really done, the gap was never one big forgotten day. It was always the small stuff:

* the 20 minute revision round that arrives at 6pm and you just do it

* reopening a project three weeks later to re-export at a different aspect ratio

* the call where you "quickly talk through" the feedback

* sitting watching a render because you do not trust it unattended

* the version 7 that the client never even sees

None of those feel big enough to open a timer for. That is exactly the problem. On a normal month it added up to more than a day of work I simply gave away, and I never noticed because no single instance was worth noticing.

What has actually helped me:

1. Track at the file level, not the project level. "Client X" is useless three weeks later. "Client X, hero_animation_v7.aep" tells you what the time was really for.

2. Log the revision rounds separately from the original build. If a job goes to v9, you want that visible when you quote the next one.

3. Assume you will not remember. Anything that needs you to press start has already failed on the 6pm revision.

Full disclosure so nobody feels tricked: I got annoyed enough that I built a Mac app for this, called BillHawk. It watches which app and which document you are actually in, so the 6pm revision gets logged without you doing anything, and it knows Blender, C4D, the Adobe apps and Resolve by name. If that is useful to you it is at getbillhawk.com, and if it is not, the three points above are the actual lesson and they work with a notebook too.

Mostly I am curious how the rest of you handle it. Do you bill revision rounds separately, build them into the quote, or just eat them?