Professional Time Recording & Billing

The invoice is a
professional judgement,
not a calculation.

BillTime 2 is the only time billing system that separates what you did from what you charge — making the recovery percentage visible, measurable and manageable.

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50 Years of experience
40+ Years proven in practice
13 Built-in reports
80kb Entire plugin, zipped
The Problem

Every other billing system gets it wrong.

Most time billing systems make a fundamental error — they treat the invoice as a formatted version of the time records. They assume time × rate = what to charge.

  • A tax advisor saves a client £50,000 in 30 minutes. A time-based system bills £50.
  • A loyal client's disorganisation caused 10 hours of work that should have taken 2. Billing in full damages the relationship.
  • No visibility into whether your practice is systematically under-recovering across all clients.
A Genuine BillTime Practice — June 2023 97 Invoices
Total time costs £41,254.89
Total amount billed £36,578.30
Highest single invoice recovery 148.6%
Lowest single invoice recovery 35.8%
Invoices billed at exact cost None
88.7%
Overall Recovery Rate

Real data from a genuine BillTime practice.
Over half of all invoices deliberately billed differently from time cost.

Our Philosophy

Time records are a guide.
The invoice is a decision.

"BillTime 2: no other system makes this professional judgement visible, measurable, and manageable."
01
The Recovery Percentage

The ratio of amount billed to time costs incurred. Visible at every level — per invoice, per client, per partner, per period. The management metric every practice needs but no other system provides.

02
The Professional Invoice

The invoice the client receives bears no resemblance to internal time records. Three clearly described professional services replace twelve individual entries. This is how professional billing should work.

03
Institutional Knowledge

The expertise that once lived in one person's head — which clients get discounts, which work commands a premium — is now encoded in the system, surviving staff changes and growing more intelligent over time.

Features

Everything a professional
practice needs.

📊
Recovery Dashboard

Every invoice shows time costs, amount billed, recovery % and profit/loss — colour coded so low recovery stands out instantly. Outstanding and overdue totals on the dashboard every time you log in. The metric that changes how you run your practice.

🎯
Three-Stage Billing

Select the client. Review time records with live running totals and recovery %. Build the professional invoice with your reusable description library. Preview as a draft before committing. Invoice number locked at commit. The original BillTime workflow, perfected.

📋
Preset Library

A growing library of reusable professional billing descriptions. Seeded with real language from 40 years of accountancy practice. Use count tracked — the most used descriptions rise to the top. Your institutional knowledge, encoded in the system.

💳
Payment Recording

Record payments by bank transfer, BACS, cheque, cash, Stripe, direct debit or any other method. Partial payments tracked with outstanding balance shown. Full payment history per invoice. Overdue invoices flagged automatically after 30 days.

📈
13 Reports

The complete original BillTime report suite — WIP, Time Costs, Timesheet, Bill Summary, Client Lists — all grouped by partner or manager. Period buttons for instant date filtering. Print-ready output. Export to Sage, Xero or generic CSV.

🔒
Full Audit Trail

Every insert, update, and delete recorded at field level with before/after values. Who did what, when, and on whose behalf. Payment allocations logged individually. Essential for regulated practices and GDPR compliance. Nothing is ever permanently deleted.

🧾
Professional PDF Invoices

Branded invoices with your logo, generated as professional PDFs. No trace of internal time records visible to the client. Preview as draft before committing — exactly what the client will receive. Clean footer with practice registration and VAT numbers.

👥
Multi-Clerk Support

Partners, managers, clerks, and support staff each with their own login. Acting For lets support staff record time and bill on behalf of fee earners, with full audit trail throughout. Rate history preserved — historical records are always accurate regardless of rate changes.

See It In Action

Short videos covering every part of BillTime 2 — watch the ones that matter most to you.

Video 1 — Are You Charging Enough for Your Time?

An introduction to BillTime 2 — the billing gap most practices don't know they have, and how to close it.

Video 2 — Your Practice at a Glance

The dashboard — recovery trends, WIP, partner performance, all in one screen.

Video 3 — Recording Time, Properly

Quick, accurate time entry with live cost calculation — the foundation everything else is built on.

Video 4 — From Time Records to Invoice

Three stages, complete visibility — and a live recovery panel that updates as you bill.

Video 5 — What Recovery Actually Means

The gap between time cost and billed amount — and why seeing it changes everything.

Video 6 — Reports That Actually Tell You Something

Thirteen reports, all pulling from the same accurate data — no re-keying, no spreadsheets.

Video 7 — Where This Is Heading

AIBA in action — AI-suggested invoice lines, drawn from your own billing history.

Video 8 — Ask Your Practice Anything

Practice Insights — curated AI questions, a forecasting tool, and free-text answers grounded in your real data.

AI-Powered — Coming Soon

Built AI-first, from the ground up.

BillTime 2 has been architected from day one to support AI assistance at the moment it matters most — when a professional sits down to turn time records into an invoice. The manual workflow is complete and proven. The AI layer is coming.

Invoice Line Suggestions

AI will analyse selected time records and suggest appropriate invoice line descriptions from your preset library — ranked by relevance, work type, and historical acceptance rate. The right words, at the right moment. Gets smarter with every invoice raised.

Billing Amount Recommendation

Based on the client's full recovery history, AI will suggest a billing amount with a plain-English explanation. Not a calculation — a recommendation, informed by every invoice you've ever raised for that client. You decide. AI informs.

Recovery Pattern Analysis

AI will monitor recovery trends across all clients and surface what matters. Which clients are consistently under-billed? Which work types command a premium? Distinguishes deliberate decisions from genuine problems. The insight your practice has always had — made visible.

Transparent AI — Always

Every AI suggestion recorded with its outcome — accepted, modified, or rejected. The system learns. You stay in control. Full audit trail of every AI interaction, every decision. No black box. No surprises. This is how AI in professional services should work.

Why AI belongs here: The invoice is a professional judgement. That judgement is currently made in isolation, with no memory of previous decisions and no pattern recognition across hundreds of invoices. AI changes that — not by replacing the judgement, but by informing it with everything the practice has ever learned. That is genuinely new. No other billing system is building this.

Our Story

50 years in the making.

BillTime 2 isn't a startup product. It's the modern rebuild of software that ran quietly and reliably in a Scottish accountancy practice for over 40 years.

1970s

The original BillTime software is developed — the first system to separate time recording from invoice construction. Its company goes bust in 1979 but the software lives on.

1980s – 2024

A genuine BillTime practice used the software continuously for over 40 years. Thousands of invoices. The recovery percentage visible on every single one.

2011

John Craig — 50 years in software development, former IT Director at EMI Music Publishing and BMG — writes the original BillTime 2 specification, determined to modernise what he saw was irreplaceable.

2026

BillTime 2 is built. AI-enhanced. WordPress plugin. UK-hosted. GDPR compliant by design. The original insight — the invoice is a professional judgement, not a calculation — finally available to every practice.

Real data. Real practice.
A genuine BillTime practice, June 2023.
Invoices raised 97
Total time costs £41,254
Total billed £36,578
Overall recovery 88.7%
Highest recovery 148.6%
Invoices at exact cost None

Over half of all invoices deliberately billed differently from actual time cost. No other system makes this visible.

Pricing

Simple, transparent pricing.

Choose the option that fits your practice. All plans include the full feature set.

Starter
£49/mo

Per practice, billed monthly

  • Up to 5 clerks
  • Up to 100 clients
  • Full billing workflow
  • PDF invoice generation
  • Recovery dashboard
  • Email support
Get Started
Most Popular
Professional
£99/mo

Per practice, billed monthly

  • Unlimited clerks
  • Unlimited clients
  • Everything in Starter
  • AI invoice suggestions
  • Acting For workflow
  • Stripe payment integration
  • Sage/Xero CSV export
  • Priority support
Get Started
Enterprise
Let's talk

Custom pricing for larger practices

  • Everything in Professional
  • SaaS hosted option
  • Custom onboarding
  • Data migration from BillTime
  • Dedicated support
  • Custom integrations
Contact Us

All prices exclude VAT. Annual billing available at 2 months free. 30-day free trial on all plans.

Ready to see your recovery
percentage for the first time?

Request a demo and we'll show you BillTime 2 working with your practice's own data.

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Get in Touch

Let's talk about your practice.

Whether you want a demo, have questions, or are ready to get started — we'd love to hear from you.

Ettrick Intelligence Ltd
UK-hosted  ·  GDPR compliant by design
Built on 50 years of enterprise software experience