This is the walkthrough for the thing most freelance work comes down to: you did the work, now you want to be paid for it accurately and get on with the next thing. It follows a single job from the moment a client appears to the moment their invoice is marked paid, so you can see how clients, projects, tasks, the time tracker, and invoicing fit together as one pipeline rather than five separate screens.
You don't have to work in exactly this order every time — but the first time through, doing it start to finish makes the connections obvious.
The goal
Bill a client for real, tracked hours — not a number you reconstructed from memory at the end of the month — and know at a glance whether that invoice has been paid.
1. Set up the client and the work
Start with who the work is for. Create the client on the new client form: a name is enough to begin, though the billing fields (company name, tax ID, address, email) are worth filling in now because they get copied onto every invoice later. See Clients for what each field does.
Give the client a home for the work by creating a project, then break the project into tasks — one per deliverable, or however you like to slice work. The point isn't bookkeeping for its own sake: tasks are what your tracked time attaches to, and later what your invoice line items are drawn from. A task you can track against is a task you can bill for.
If you're not sure how clients, projects, and tasks relate, How your items connect explains the hierarchy.
2. Track the hours as you work
Now do the work, and let the time tracker record it as you go rather than reconstructing it afterwards.
- Run the timer. Open the Time tracker and start the timer when you begin a task; stop it when you switch away. Link each entry to the task you're working on — that link is the thread that later ties the hours back to a billable line.
- Or log after the fact. Forgot to start it? Add an entry by hand with the start and end times. A tracked hour and a hand-logged hour are the same to everything downstream.
- Tag for context. Add tags like
deep-workorrevisionto group time by theme later, independently of which client or project it belongs to. (Whether the work is billable is a property of the task, not a tag.)
One thing worth knowing up front: an entry linked to several tasks is still one entry of one duration — linking it around never multiplies your hours. So you can link freely without inflating what you'll bill.
3. See what's billable
Before you invoice, get an honest total. Open Time tracker insights and set the date range to the period you're billing. Group by task, project, or tag to see where the hours actually went. This is your reality check: the number you're about to put on an invoice should match what insights shows for that client's work, not a rounder, hopeful figure.
4. Turn the hours into an invoice
Open the new invoice form and pick the client — the billing details you filled in at step 1 are copied in automatically, and you can override any of them for this one invoice.
Add your line items. Each line has a description, an amount, optional tax, and an optional task link. Picking a task pre-fills the description, which is why the task breakdown from step 1 pays off here: your invoice reads as the work you actually did, task by task, instead of a single vague "consulting" line. Set the invoice number, issue and due dates, currency, and status.
For the full field-by-field reference — proforma vs. full invoices, QR-code payment data, per-line tax rates — see Invoices.
5. Brand the invoice
The invoice a client receives should carry your name, not a generic template. If you haven't already, set up your brand and billing info once (logo, company details, bank details) and tune the invoice template — colors, labels, which sections show. The detail page shows a live PDF preview using your real brand, so you can see exactly what the client will get before anything leaves your hands.
6. Send it and track its status
From the invoice's detail page, use Export PDF to capture the invoice as it stands — each export is frozen at that moment, so later edits never rewrite a copy you've already sent. Then use Email to send it: the composer opens with your invoice template loaded and the client's details filled in, and you can attach the PDF you just exported. Sent mail is recorded on the Email logs page. Email covers templates and attachments in depth.
Now the invoice lives in your workflow. As it moves from Sent toward Paid, update its status from the list or detail page. Every change is recorded, so you always know where each invoice stands.
7. Close the loop
When the money arrives, move the invoice to a status flagged finished (usually Paid). That flag is what tells Ceum the job is done: the invoice drops out of overdue checks and stops nagging you. If it goes past its due date first, an alert surfaces it so it doesn't quietly slip.
The whole lifecycle — statuses, reminders, what "finished" means — is laid out in Invoicing workflow if you want the reference version.
What you end up with
One client's work, tracked to the hour, billed as the tasks you actually did, sent under your own brand, and marked paid — with every step recorded so nothing depends on your memory. Do it once end to end and the next one is muscle memory.