How senior consultants should think about time rounding and billing fairness

Why time rounding matters more than most consultants realise

If you bill by the hour, rounding rules quietly shape your income.

A few minutes here and there feels insignificant, but across a month it can add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars. More importantly, the way you round time signals how you think about fairness, professionalism, and trust.

Most advice online assumes you are either:

• an agency optimising utilisation, or
• a junior freelancer defending every six-minute increment

But senior consultants operate differently. You are typically selling judgement, leadership, and outcomes rather than raw keystrokes. Your billing approach should reflect that.

This guide lays out a sensible, industry-aligned way to think about time rounding from a senior consultant’s perspective.

The problem with “raw time”

Billing strictly on raw time sounds fair in theory, but it breaks down in practice.

Consider this common scenario:

• You work for 2 hours
• You switch between PR reviews, specs and deployment prep
• You take short breaks, answer Slack messages and context switch

Raw time ignores:

• mental overhead
• task switching cost
• interruptions that are part of real work

Most professional billing tools therefore apply rounding. The question is how, and where.

Rounding increments: what actually works

The most common rounding increment in professional consulting is 15 minutes.

Why 15 minutes?

• It balances accuracy and simplicity
• It avoids noisy invoice amounts
• It aligns with client expectations
• It recovers unavoidable overhead without padding

Smaller increments (6 minutes) tend to encourage micromanagement. Larger increments (30 or 60 minutes) often feel blunt and unfair.

Recommendation:
Use a 15-minute increment as a default.

Round up or round to nearest?

This is a subtle but important distinction.

Round to nearest

• 22 minutes → 15 minutes
• 38 minutes → 45 minutes

This minimises variance but tends to under-recover short sessions.

Round up

• 22 minutes → 30 minutes
• 38 minutes → 45 minutes

This better reflects the cost of starting work at all.

Industry convention:
Round up.

This is not about inflating time. It recognises that even short sessions have setup and cognitive cost.

Note there is some care needed to ensure this remains fair to both yourself and your client. Using an approach from conventional freelancer invoicing tools will tend to silently inflate your hours while attempting to maintain defensibility. As a senior consultant you should be wary of this approach because nickle and diming clients leads to reduced trust, essentially swapping long-term sustainability for short-term gains.

Handling short breaks fairly

Real work is not continuous.

You might:

• pause for a coffee
• answer a message
• switch briefly between related tasks

Treating every pause as a new billable block quickly becomes unfair.

A more reasonable approach is to define a small break threshold.

Example:

• If the gap between work sessions is 5 minutes or less, treat it as continuous work
• If it exceeds that threshold, start a new block

This avoids both:

• over-fragmenting work
• artificially inflating billable time

Recommendation:
Use a 5 to 10 minute small-break threshold.

Merging related work

Senior consultants often work across related tasks in a single flow.

For example:

• reviewing pull requests
• updating specs
• preparing a deployment

Even if these are tracked as separate tasks, they often belong to the same type of work on an invoice.

A fair approach is to:

• merge closely spaced work that appears on the same invoice line
• apply rounding once to the merged block

This reflects how clients actually experience the work: as a continuous engagement, not a set of disconnected actions.

Granularity and its impact on billing

The more granular your invoice lines, the more rounding opportunities exist.

With a 15-minute increment:

• 1 invoice line → max rounding impact of 15 minutes
• 4 invoice lines → up to 1 hour
• 8 invoice lines → potentially much more

This is not inherently wrong, but it is a trade-off.

Highly granular invoices:

• maximise rounding recovery
• increase scrutiny
• feel transactional

High-level invoices:

• cap rounding impact
• feel more professional
• align with outcome-based consulting

Senior consultants typically prefer fewer, higher-level invoice lines.

A fair, senior-consultant approach

Putting this together, a sensible default looks like this:

• Track time normally
• Merge related work separated by short breaks
• Round each merged block up to 15 minutes
• Sum those rounded blocks per invoice line
• Avoid rounding again at the final total

This approach:

• recovers real overhead
• avoids extreme rounding artefacts
• produces clean invoices
• aligns with client expectations
• keeps billing within a few percent of actual time worked

How Quivva approaches this

Quivva is designed around senior consulting workflows.

By default it:

• merges closely spaced work
• rounds conservatively
• caps maximum rounding impact per invoice line
• favours clarity over aggressive monetisation

The result is billing that is:

• predictable
• defensible
• fair
• and aligned with how experienced consultants actually work

Final thoughts

There is no single “correct” way to round time.

There is a clear difference between:

• billing that quietly erodes trust, and
• billing that reflects professional judgement

Senior consultants tend to choose the latter.

If your invoices feel calm, consistent, and unsurprising to your clients, you are probably doing it right.