Manual time

Upwork's examples are phone calls, paper sketches, file transfers or anything that happens offline. The client must have manual time enabled on the contract, and can turn it on or off at any time, so Upwork advises checking with them before adding hours. The warning that matters most is short: "Manual time isn't covered by Hourly Protection." A freelancer adding it is trusting the client to pay.

To add it, open the work diary, choose the contract and the day, select Add manual time, enter the time range and a short description of the work, and save. The desktop app has the same option. The rules:

• Only for open billing periods.
• Only in time slots that have no tracked time already.
• Not once the work diary locks; after that it can't be edited.
• Not on a paused contract.

Manual time is billed like tracked time. It appears in the work diary as its own kind of segment, and the client is invoiced for it with the week's other hours. The difference shows only when something goes wrong: if the client disputes the week, tracked time that meets the criteria of Hourly Protection is paid regardless, and manual time is not.

For agencies whose members spend much of their time in meetings or working offline, manual time is the honest way to bill that work. It is also a reason to agree with the client at the start which kinds of work will be logged by hand, so that the first manual entry is not the first time the client hears about it.