Clients judge the finished result. The business has to account for everything required to produce it. Two projects can look nearly identical at delivery and consume completely different weeks behind the scenes.
One client arrives prepared, answers decisions quickly, and keeps feedback in one place. Another adds stakeholders, changes direction after work begins, and spreads comments across calls, email, and documents. The deliverable may match. The labor does not.
Illustrative project math
$4,500 looked like $188/hr. The full project worked out to about $88/hr.
You remembered 24 hours of visible delivery. Count message development, media research, list building, pitching, follow-up, interviews, monitoring, and reports: 51 hours in all. This is an example, not an industry rate.
The point is not that every engagement should be hourly. It is that a fixed fee or package only works when you know what is inside it. Otherwise the cleanest-looking job can quietly become the worst-paying one.
“Can you also handle one more announcement folded into the month without changing the retainer?”
The request may be reasonable. That does not automatically place it inside the original scope. A running project total lets you decide while choices still exist: include it, trade it for something else, add a fee, or make a deliberate exception.
Waiting until delivery to reconstruct the extra work is too late. The useful moment is when the request arrives and the scope can still be discussed without drama.
Create the client and project once, then keep message development, media research, list building, pitching, follow-up, interviews, monitoring, and reports attached to it. The work stops living across a timer, notes, messages, and an invoice you rebuild later.
Use the timer for focused delivery, calls, preparation, revisions, and follow-up. Auto-stop protects against forgotten sessions. Billable and non-billable time stay separate, so internal admin does not distort the client total.
When the client adds one more announcement folded into the month without changing the retainer, look at the running time before saying yes. Tympi does not force a confrontation. It gives you enough evidence to make a commercial choice instead of absorbing the work by accident.
Compare estimated time with actual time when the job closes. In this illustrative example, 51 hours at a required $115/hour points to a $5,865 project floor. That is not a market claim. It is the arithmetic of your own workload and target.
Turn reviewed time into clear invoice lines, apply the correct client rate, produce a branded PDF, and keep paid, unpaid, and overdue status visible. You do not have to reconstruct the month from memory.
A connected record helps you answer the questions that improve the next quote:
Tympi connects the client, project, tasks, time, and invoice. The goal is not to monitor every minute for its own sake. It is to create a clean feedback loop between the work you sold, the work you performed, and the next price you set.
Measure one real project from start to finish.
Track message development, media research, list building, pitching, follow-up, interviews, monitoring, and reports. At the end, compare the hours you expected with the hours the project used. Then invoice from a clean record and carry the lesson into the next quote.
Free plan - 5 clients, 5 projects, 50 time logs, and 3 invoices per month. No card.
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