I am starting to take on more freelance podcast cleanup and voiceover editing using Audacity, but I am struggling with how to bill my clients accurately.
Obviously, a 1-hour podcast takes way more than 1 hour to edit, but I keep losing track of my actual working hours because I frequently pause to rest my ears or take breaks. It is making my weekly invoicing a complete nightmare.
Does anyone have a good workflow for tracking the actual hours spent actively editing? Do you just use a stopwatch on your desk, or is there a better way to calculate this so I stop undercharging?
Thanks for the suggestion, Trebor! I took a look at that Reddit list. Some of those tracking apps look really powerful, but honestly, installing another background program felt like overkill for my setup—especially since a lot of them require monthly subscriptions just for basic time tracking.
I actually ended up stumbling on a much simpler workaround over the weekend. Now, I just jot down my start and stop times on a sticky note whenever I’m actively editing in Audacity. At the end of the day, I plug those times into a free web calculator that automatically subtracts the breaks I took to rest my ears, and it gives me the exact decimal hours for my invoices.
I’ll leave the link here in case any other freelance audio editors find this thread and want a simple, no-install solution: https://calculadorhoraspro.com
Really appreciate you taking the time to help me figure this out!
Think differently. There are all kinds of programs that companies use to monitor their employee’s computer usage. No doubt one of them would work for your purpose.