Invoicing from Clockify on the Free Plan: Billable Rates Are Paid, Here Is the Workaround

You tracked the hours, the client wants an invoice this week, and the money half of Clockify sits behind a paywall. Here is the route from raw entries to a sendable invoice without upgrading — and where it runs out.

The paywall

What Free actually blocks

Two features, gated at two different levels — which is why people meet them a day apart.

Billable rates are a paid feature. Clockify's help centre calls billable rate "a paid feature available on any paid plan"; its hourly rates page says Basic and above. Its summary of the Free plan changes is blunter: "You can no longer set hourly rates, assign dollar amounts to projects."

Creating an invoice needs more. Building an invoice from a report is documented as available "on Standard and higher subscription plans" — Basic buys rates and amounts, not the invoice.

Two more Free limits matter here: exports are PDF only, and the report date-range filter is capped at one month (31 days) per query — a quarterly invoice means three exports.

Step 1

Get the entries out with date, description, project, start, end, hours

You need one row per entry, with enough columns to defend a line item: date, description, project, start, end, hours. Those turn "14 hours" into something a client can check.

• PDF report. Available, but you are copy-pasting out of a PDF, 31 days at a time. It works once; it does not survive as a monthly habit.
• The Clockify API. Free workspaces can use it, so this route keeps working. Note the limit: Clockify documents that newly created Free workspaces are capped at 30 API requests per hour, against 50 per second on paid plans. A monthly pull is a handful of requests; a loop that re-polls is not. The Apps Script version of this pull is written out here.

Either way the target is rows in decimal hours, not 2:25 — you are about to multiply that number.

Step 2

Apply your rate in the sheet instead of in Clockify

Make a second tab called Rates: the project name exactly as it appears in Clockify, and the hourly rate. One advantage over the real feature — you can change a rate retroactively without touching your records.

Rates

Example rate table

	A	B
1	Project	Rate
2	Acme — website redesign	65.00
3	Nord Consulting — Q3 retainer	80.00
4	(no project)	0.00

The imported rows sit on a sheet named Hours: project in column C, hours in column F, and column G already occupied by the billable flag. So build the money columns on a separate tab and point them at Hours explicitly. On a tab called Invoice, row 2, column A holds the rate and column B the amount:

• Rate: =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(Hours!$C2, Rates!$A:$B, 2, FALSE), 0)
• Amount: =Hours!$F2 * $A2

Fill both down as far as your rows go. The IFERROR is deliberate: a project missing from the rate table shows zero, not #N/A.

Step 4

Turn the summary into an invoice, and what to leave out

Grouped hours plus an amount per group is a line-item table — most of an invoice. Clockify publishes free invoice templates in Google Docs, Sheets, Word, Excel and PDF, downloadable without an account or a paid plan: they are a marketing asset, not a product feature, so the Standard-plan gate does not apply.

What to leave out matters as much as what goes in:

• Start and end times. They invite a line-by-line audit of your working day. Keep them in the sheet as evidence, and produce them only if challenged.
• The billable column. On Free it reads "no" for every row — confusing at best.
• Internal descriptions. "Fixing the thing I broke on Tuesday" is an honest time entry and a bad line item. Rewrite for the client.
• Zero-amount rows. Admin time you are not charging for does not need a €0 line.

Keep the detailed sheet, send the summary.

Honest limits

Multiple rates and multiple currencies: where a spreadsheet stops being enough

The rate-table approach handles one rate per project cleanly. It handles these badly:

• Rates that changed mid-period. A single lookup applies today's rate to March's hours. You need valid-from dates and a lookup on the entry date — a source of silent errors.
• Different rates per person, or per task inside one project. The key becomes two columns, so the simple VLOOKUP turns into an index-match.
• Multiple currencies. This is where I would stop: a spreadsheet will happily add euros to dollars and hand you a confident wrong number.

Rule of thumb: if your pricing fits in one sentence, a spreadsheet is fine. If the sentence needs an "except when", price the upgrade.

Where this fits

Where HourSync's Summary sheet fits, and its current availability

HourSync is a Google Sheets add-on that does Step 1 and part of Step 3. It reads entries through the Clockify API — which Free workspaces can use — and writes them into a sheet named Hours: date, description, project, start, end, hours, billable. Every import rewrites that sheet, so your formulas keep pointing at one range.

On Pro it also writes a Summary sheet: one row per project sorted alphabetically, total hours, and a TOTAL row — the grouped-hours table from Step 3. You still add the rate lookup on your own tab, because HourSync does not know your rates and never asks.

Summary

Example of the Summary sheet

	A	B
1	Project	Total hours
2	Acme — website redesign	8.42
3	Nord Consulting — Q3 retainer	2.83
4	(no project)	0.67
5	TOTAL	11.92

Pro adds the project filter, the billable filter, the Summary sheet and a daily refresh — with the caveat that follows from everything above: the billable filter is useless on a Free Clockify workspace, because every entry there is non-billable. The rest works on any plan.

If you need to invoice this week, the four steps above work with a PDF export and an afternoon. More on how HourSync works and what it costs.