Work project time rounding: round billable hours with rules and project groups

Work project time rounding: round billable hours with rules and project groups

When you bill time, you often want to round it to tidy units — say, to the nearest 15 minutes, or always up to the next quarter hour with a 30-minute minimum. NexerIQ does this with time rounding rules. You set the rules once; NexerIQ then works out the billable hours for every work-journal line — whether the time was typed in by hand or brought in from ZoHo Desk or Jira. Don't worry if this sounds fiddly: a single default rule covers most companies.

Before you start

  • The Work Journal feature is enabled for your company.

Where to set it up

Go to Settings → Work → Time Rounding. You'll see a Default Time Rounding Rule at the top and, below it, the list of rules you've created.

Create a rounding rule

Click Add Time Rounding Rule and fill in:

  • Name — what you'll recognise it by (e.g. "Quarter hour, round up").
  • Rounding modeUp (always to the next unit), Down, or Nearest.
  • Increment minutes — the unit to round to (e.g. 15).
  • Minimum / Maximum minutes — optional floor and ceiling for a line.
  • Enabled — turn a rule off without deleting it.

Set the company default

Pick a rule as the Default Time Rounding Rule and Save Settings. This rule applies to every work project unless something more specific overrides it.

Scope a rule to project groups

If different kinds of work should round differently, give a rule one or more Project groups in its editor. The rule then applies to any work project that belongs to one of those groups. NexerIQ picks the rule for a project in this order:

  1. The rule set directly on the work project, if any.
  2. A rule scoped to one of the project's groups.
  3. The company default rule.

So you can keep one sensible default and add group-scoped rules only where the billing should differ.

How rounding is applied

  • Billable hours are worked out for every work-journal line — whether it's marked billable or not — so you always see the tidy hours the work amounts to. The original logged hours are kept too, so you see both.
  • It applies the same way to time entered by hand and to time synced from ZoHo Desk and Jira.
  • Whether those hours are actually charged is a separate matter: non-billable lines are either left off the invoice or shown as complimentary (free) lines — see How NexerIQ matches a billing product to work-journal time.

Tip: start with a single default rule. Add a group-scoped rule only when a set of projects genuinely needs different rounding — it keeps the setup easy to reason about.

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