How to Review Subcontractor Hours Before You Build the Client Invoice

Billing through a subcontractor's hours to a client is one of the places where things quietly go wrong. The subcontractor logs time. You trust the numbers. You invoice the client. Later something does not add up and you are the one who owns it. Here is a process that catches problems before they reach the client.

Get Subcontractor Hours Logged Under the Right Project

Before any work starts, make sure your subcontractor is logging time against the correct project in Time-Trak. If you have added them to your workspace, they should be selecting the client project, not creating their own catch-all. Misrouted hours are invisible until you try to reconcile at invoice time. Confirm this on day one, not day thirty.

Pull the Report Before You Sit Down to Invoice

Do not invoice from memory or from a number someone texted you. Pull the actual time report from Time-Trak that shows hours logged by user. You want to see your hours and their hours side by side, broken down by task and date. This is the first place discrepancies show up. A subcontractor who logged eight hours on a day the project was paused is a problem you want to find now.

Check for Sessions With No Context

Time-Trak captures automatic screenshots during tracked sessions. If your subcontractor is working through your account, those screenshots are attached to their sessions. Review them. Not because you distrust the person, but because screenshots reveal whether the time logged maps to the work delivered. A four-hour session with screenshots showing one document is worth a conversation before it hits the client invoice.

This is also your protection. If a client disputes the hours later, you have visual documentation of what the work sessions looked like. That is worth far more than your word against theirs.

Apply Your Markup Before You Review the Total

If you are billing the subcontractor's hours at a markup, apply that in Time-Trak at the task or project level before you finalize anything. Do not do the math manually in a spreadsheet. Manual markup calculations on exported data are where rounding errors and honest mistakes end up becoming billing disputes. Set the client-facing rate in the project settings and let the system calculate the total.

Flag Any Hours That Need Clarification Before Invoicing

Go through the time log line by line. Any entry that looks off, any date that does not match your communication history, any session that seems longer than the work would justify, flag it with a note and ask the subcontractor before you invoice. It takes more time upfront. It takes much more time if you invoice incorrectly and have to explain it to a client or issue a correction.

Separate Your Hours From Theirs in the Client Report

When you generate the client-facing report, decide upfront whether the client sees hours broken down by person or just by task. Many clients do not need to know a subcontractor was involved. They just need to see the work categories and the totals. Time-Trak lets you configure what the report shows. Use that. A clean, task-level breakdown with no internal staffing details is usually the clearest way to present pass-through hours.

Document the Final Reconciliation

Once you have reviewed the hours and built the invoice, save a copy of the time report that matches. If a question comes up in three months about what you billed and why, you want to be able to pull up the exact report that the invoice was based on. This is basic protection. It also makes you look serious and organized when a client asks, which is the kind of thing that keeps clients coming back.

Subcontractor billing is not hard. It just requires a real process instead of a handshake and a hope.

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