Applying a Billing Rate to Time Entries in Zoho Desk

Automatically Add a Cost to an Agent When They Create a Time Entry

This has changed since it was originally answered. Zoho Desk now supports applying a billing rate to time entries automatically, though the mechanism is based on setting rates per agent, profile, or ticket, rather than the system inferring a cost with no configuration at all.

How Billing Rates Work Now

Within Zoho Desk's Time Tracking feature, you can set hourly billing rates by agent, by profile, or by ticket. Once configured, a time entry logged against that agent, profile, or ticket automatically calculates a cost using the applicable rate, rather than requiring the rate to be entered manually every time.

Setting It Up

  1. Enable Time Tracking, which can be configured separately for each department.
  2. Set hourly billing rates against the agents, profiles, or tickets you want covered.
  3. Choose whether agents clock time manually, or have it tracked automatically, and which specific actions count towards tracked time, such as sending a reply, drafting a response, or leaving a comment.
A limitation worth knowing about: Setting a rate per customer account, rather than per agent or ticket, is not natively supported. Businesses that bill different clients at different rates regardless of which agent worked the ticket have consistently reported needing manual correction on invoices as a workaround, since Zoho Desk's billing rate structure is built around who did the work, not who's being billed. If your business genuinely needs per-account billing rates, this is worth flagging with Zoho support directly, or exploring a custom function to handle rate calculation based on the associated Account.

Feeding Costs into an Invoice

If you're using the Zoho Books or Zoho Invoice integration to bill customers based on logged time, be aware that some users have reported friction rolling up multiple small time entries into a single invoice line item, or applying different rates to different people working the same task. If a clean, automated billing workflow is essential to your operation, it's worth testing this specific scenario in a sandbox before relying on it for live invoicing.

Need help? 1 Cloud Consultants can help you configure Time Tracking billing rates in Zoho Desk, and design a workaround for account-level rates if you need them. Book a discovery call with 1 Cloud Consultants.