[Feature Request] Mark time entries as not billable

[dlundgren]

It would be nice to have the ability to mark time entries in a task as billable or not billable. Sometimes not all the time tracked is billable to a client.

While we can currently work around this by using a separate task for tracking non-billable time to a client, it seems like something that should be kept in a single task instead of multiple tasks.

[MegaphoneJon]

As a veteran of several time-tracking/invoicing tools, IMO the one that handles this best is Freshbooks. On the task timer, you can specify a "type" of task - e.g. coding, client meeting, translation, etc. Separate tables allow you to store whether a task is billable or not - and also store the rate for that type of work (on a per-client basis). This significantly cuts down on the time needed to generate an invoice based on tasks.

Here's a rough sketch of how you'd change the Invoice Ninja data schema:
In addition to tasks and projects tables, you'd add:
task_types
task_types_projects

task_types would define the following fields:
id
name
is_billable

tasks_types_projects is a many-to-many lookup table, and would be defined as:
id
project_id
task_type_id
cost

Note that Freshbooks has a more complicated schema for their equivalent tables, because they allow you to choose whether a task's rate is hourly by type of work, hourly by which employee, or flat. This schema only accounts for "hourly by type of work". Changing is_billable from a boolean to a billing_type would allow future growth in that direction.

From a UI perspective, you'd add a widget to edit a list of allowable task types on the "Create/Edit a Project" view, then add a "Task Type" select box to the "Create/Edit a Task" view.

In addition to simplifying invoice generation, this also allows for reporting on questions like, "How much time do we spend on email vs. coding?" or "billable vs. non-billble" generally.

[hillelcoren]

I would have thought to add the billable setting to that task as a whole (similar to the expense 'Mark billable' setting) rather than the individual times.