How to Use Block Billing

Type your time inside brackets to automatically adjust a time entry’s hours

Doug Schmierer avatar
Written by Doug Schmierer
Updated over a week ago

Similar to short codes, block billing is a tool that makes your time entries’ descriptions interactive and allows you to increase the Hours value of a time entry from within the description. Block billing is always enabled, works with new time entries on the Time Entries and Calendar pages, will be disabled for a time entry if you manually adjust the time entry’s Hours field, and only works with brackets [ ].


How to use block billing


Block billing can be as simple as adding numbers in brackets to your time entries.

1. Describe an activity

Block billing is intended for time entries of multiple, descriptive activities. Begin by describing an activity, such as “Email with John Doe regarding billing.”

2. Enter the time that activity took

Using brackets, type the amount of time it took to perform that activity. For example, if it took 12 minutes to type the email to John Doe, type [.2] after the activity's description. As soon as you type the closing bracket, LeanLaw will automatically adjust your time entry to .2 hours.

3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 as needed

Continue typing activities with their durations in brackets. LeanLaw will add each duration typed inside of a bracket to the Hours field. For example, the description, “Email with John Doe regarding billing [.2] phone call with John Doe regarding the same [.5],” will cause the Hours field to show a value of .7 as seen in the gif below.

A gif showing a description of [.2] and [.5] adjusting a time entry to .7 Hours.


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