Getting Started with Paythread — Paythread Learn

Welcome to Paythread

Paythread is built for freelancers who want to spend less time on invoicing and more time on the work that matters. This guide walks you through the essential setup so you can start tracking time and sending invoices right away.

Create Your Account

Head to paythread.app and sign up with email/password or your Google account. If you prefer to skip passwords entirely, choose the magic link option — Paythread will email you a one-time sign-in link instead. Once authenticated, you'll land on your Dashboard, which will look pretty empty for now. That's about to change.

Set Up Your Business Profile

Your business profile is what appears on every invoice you send, so it's worth getting right from the start. Navigate to Settings from the sidebar to fill in your details.

Configure your business profile in Settings

Here's what to fill in:

Company name — This appears at the top of your invoices. Use your legal business name or your full name if you operate as a sole proprietor.
Address — Your business address is displayed on invoices for your clients' records.
Logo — Upload your logo (PNG, JPG, SVG, or WebP — 400×400px recommended, 2MB max). It will appear on all invoices and PDFs.
Contact info — Phone, email, and website are optional but add professionalism to your invoices.
Default hourly rate — Set your standard rate here. This pre-fills the timer's rate field whenever you start tracking. You can always override it per client or per work item.

Add Your First Client

Clients are the foundation of everything in Paythread. Every work item and invoice is tied to a client, so you'll want to add at least one before doing anything else.

Go to Clients in the sidebar and click + Add Client. You'll need to provide:

Client name — The company or person you're billing.
Email address — This is where invoices will be sent.
Address fields (optional) — Street address, city, state, and zip appear on your invoices.
Default hourly rate (optional) — If this client has a different rate than your global default, set it here. When you select this client in the timer, their rate will auto-fill. If left empty, your global default rate applies.

The Clients page showing your client list — Manage all your clients from one place

You can add as many clients as you need. Each client gets their own view of unbilled work and invoice history, making it easy to keep everything organized.

A Quick Tour of the Dashboard

Once you have a client set up, here's what you'll find in the sidebar:

Dashboard — Your home base. Summary cards show unbilled, invoiced, and paid totals. Charts track revenue and unbilled work over time. Quick actions link you to the most common tasks.
Unbilled — All your completed work items land here, waiting to be invoiced. Filter by client, edit inline, or select items to bundle into an invoice.
Invoices — View, manage, and send your invoices. Create new ones from unbilled work items, download PDFs, or send via email with payment links.
Clients — Manage the people and companies you bill. Each client has a name, email, optional address, and optional default hourly rate.
Reports — Detailed analytics across three tabs: Work Items, Invoices, and Tax Summary. Filter by client, date range, and type. Export CSV reports.
Settings — Your business profile (company info, logo, default hourly rate), timer rounding preferences, Stripe Connect, and data management.
Help — AI chat assistant, guides, and FAQ all in one place.

The Timer lives in the header bar — always accessible from any page. Click it to start tracking, and when you finish, the session lands in your Unbilled queue.

The timer popover in the header bar — The timer is always accessible from the header — start tracking in one click

The core flow is simple: do work, track it, invoice it. Everything moves through the system in a natural pipeline so nothing slips through the cracks.

The dashboard with stats cards, charts, and quick actions — Your dashboard gives you a real-time snapshot of earnings, unbilled work, and recent activity

Customize Your Preferences

Before you start tracking work, take a moment to review a couple of useful settings:

Timer rounding — Choose how timer durations are rounded when you finish tracking. Options include exact (hundredths of an hour), tenth-of-hour increments from 6 to 54 minutes, 15 minutes (quarter hour), and 1 hour. Rounding is always up.
Default hourly rate — Set your standard rate so it auto-fills in the timer. Per-client rates (set on each client) override this.

These small choices up front save you from fiddly edits later.

Manage Your Account

Your profile menu in the top-right corner gives you access to additional settings:

Account — View your current plan (Free or Pro), upgrade to Pro, change your email address, and update your password.
Payment Methods — Set up how clients can pay you. Add Stripe for online payments, bank transfer details, PayPal, Venmo, or custom instructions. You'll attach these to invoices when you create them.

Payment methods configuration page — Set up payment methods from the profile menu so clients know how to pay you

If you ever forget your password, use the Forgot password? link on the sign-in page to receive a reset email.

What's Next?

Now that your account is set up, you're ready to create your first invoice. Head over to Your First Invoice in 5 Minutes to walk through the full process end to end. If you want to understand the different ways to log billable work first, check out 3 Ways to Track Billable Work.