Can I set my own time rounding increment instead of the default?

Yes — the increment your time entries round to is a setting you choose. Whether you round to the nearest tenth of an hour, the nearest quarter hour, or something else is a billing policy decision that should follow your engagement letters, not the other way around.

Why rounding increment is a policy question first

A coarser increment rounds short entries up more aggressively, which can inflate a bill in ways clients notice on review, or it rounds down and quietly gives work away — either way, the increment is shaping realization before a single invoice goes out. A finer increment tracks actual time more closely, at the cost of timekeepers entering more granular numbers more often. Neither choice is right in the abstract; it’s right or wrong relative to what your engagement letters promise and what your fee arrangements can absorb.

The tradeoff a finer increment doesn’t erase

Tightening the rounding increment doesn’t fix a capture problem underneath it. If timekeepers aren’t recording time as it happens, or descriptions are vague enough that a bill gets written down on review, a finer increment just measures the gap more precisely without closing it. The distance between time actually worked and time that survives to the invoice is a separate question from rounding — see billable hours vs. actual hours for how that gap forms, and LeanLaw’s WIP, realization, and velocity reporting for how to see it on your own numbers rather than guess at it.

Whether one increment has to apply to every matter

Rounding increment doesn’t have to be a single firm-wide habit. Contingency matters generally don’t round time at all, since there’s no hourly rate for the rounding to apply to, and flat-fee matters may not either. A firm running hourly, flat-fee, and contingent work side by side is really making several rounding decisions, one per fee arrangement, and it’s worth making each of them on purpose rather than defaulting to whatever the first matter used.

What this depends on

• Whether your engagement letters specify a rounding convention client by client.
• Which operating model a given matter runs under, since contingency and flat-fee work don’t round time the same way hourly work does.
• How consistently timekeepers currently enter time, since a finer increment only helps when entries are already accurate.
• Your firm’s own realization tracking, since rounding increment is one lever among several that determines what’s billed versus what’s earned.

Related questions

Need the ability to be in 0.25 instead of 0.1s — can you do that? Rounding to the nearest quarter hour instead of a tenth of an hour is a policy choice, not a technical limitation. Which one fits depends on your fee agreements more than on preference.

Is that variable by matter, or a setup for the whole system? Whether a single rounding convention should apply everywhere, or vary by fee arrangement, is worth deciding on purpose — contingency and flat-fee matters usually don’t need one at all.