A: Hi,

A way to handle this is by using Expenses for the fixed truck roll / service call fee.

You could record the initial service call as a billable expense against the client or project, for example:

Expense: Service call / truck roll — includes first hour
Amount: $XXX
Billable: Yes

Then, when creating the invoice, add that billable expense to the invoice. After that, only track and bill the additional time beyond the first included hour at your normal additional-hour rate of $YYY/hr.

For example, if the total visit was 2.5 hours, the invoice would show:

* Service call / truck roll, includes first hour: $XXX
* Additional labor: 1.5 hours × $YYY/hr

This avoids double billing the first hour because the fixed truck roll covers it, and the hourly time only starts after that first hour.

That said, if you want this to appear more like a normal service fee instead of an expense/reimbursement, you can also add it as a custom invoice line item. Both approaches work — the expense method is useful if you want to track truck rolls as billable charges across clients/projects, while the custom line item is cleaner if it is simply part of your service pricing.

Right now, Hoursmith does not automatically apply a “first hour included, then bill additional hours” rule, but this is a great use case and I’ll note it as a billing-template feature request.

I hope that helps.

Thank you,
Nivesh