AI Billing Agent: Invoice Drafts from Clockify, Validated by You

Billing from time spent looks simple until the end of the month. You have to find everyone's hours, attach them to the right client, apply the right rate, spot forgotten entries or time without a project, and check that the promised budget is not exceeded. The work is repetitive, error-prone and postponed to the last minute. It is a good fit for an autonomous AI agent: reading, arithmetic and method, with a human validation before anything goes out.

The inspiration: a draft ready, a human decision

User stories of autonomous agents describe a simple use: the agent reads the time tracking, prepares the invoice and stops before sending. The gain is not billing without looking, it is no longer starting from a blank page. Atako keeps that split: the agent prepares and flags, the human decides and sends.

What the agent does

The scenario deploys a single agent, the billing preparer. It starts by finding the workspace you named in Clockify, then lists the clients, projects and users and reads each person's time entries.

It groups hours by client, then project, then task, and applies your rates and terms. Before writing, it lists the gaps: entries without a project or description, entries left running or over twelve hours, projects above the budget you gave, hours with a non-billable tag, clients with hours but no rate.

It then writes, in the project wiki, one "Invoice draft" page per client and month: lines with hours, rate and amount, subtotal, VAT if you gave it, total, payment term, and a client recap in a neutral tone. When every client is drafted, it asks you one grouped validation question listing each draft with its total and gaps, then waits for your answer.

What the agent does not do

The agent never sends an invoice, an email or a message to a client. It creates, changes and deletes no time entry: Clockify is read only for it. It does not guess: a missing rate, an unknown client or an ambiguous entry end up in the list of gaps, never in an invented amount. And it shows its arithmetic line by line, with the rounding rule used.

How to set it up in Atako

Deployment takes four steps.

1. Connect Clockify. Paste your Clockify API key when Atako asks. The connection is checked before anything is created.
2. Fill in your context. Give the workspace name, your hourly rates and terms (currency, VAT, payment term) and, if you wish, budgets per project and hours never billed.
3. Deploy. One action creates the agent and the "Invoice drafts" project. The agent is provisioned and receives its first instructions on its own.
4. First drafts, then a monthly rhythm. The current month's drafts and the validation question arrive when the first run ends. The agent then schedules itself a run on the last working day of each month at 5 pm.

If you do not have an account yet, creating one starts your trial and the scenario is configured right after.

Where to see the results

In the "Invoice drafts" project wiki, each draft is a page you open, read and correct. The validation question appears in your Atako notices: you answer to approve, correct or hold each draft. On the floor, the agent shows its current activity.

You can also talk to it in the chat: ask it to redo a client, change the period or explain a line.

Why a draft rather than an invoice

An invoice commits the company: a wrong amount, a forgotten rate or an hour billed twice are paid for in reminders and in trust. The draft moves the effort to the right place. The long work, gathering and computing, is done by the agent and stays checkable line by line; the work that needs judgment, deciding to offer an hour, to round differently or to postpone a client, stays yours. The validation question is grouped so that you handle every client of the month in one pass, with the gaps in front of you, instead of reopening one draft after another.

The same logic applies to the rhythm. A monthly run is enough for most small teams, because the gaps it finds are easier to fix while the month is still fresh in everyone's memory. If you bill weekly, or per project when it ends, say so in the chat and the agent adjusts its schedule and keeps the same method, the same checks and the same validation step.

Guardrails

Access to Clockify is deliberately narrow: eight read tools, no write tool. Sending an invoice never goes through the agent. Validation sits where it matters: before any amount reaches a client, you see the totals and the gaps, and the decision is yours.

What to expect

Expect drafts that are mostly useful for what they reveal: forgotten entries, hours without a project and budgets that drift show up before sending rather than after the client's complaint. A draft is never more accurate than the time tracking it comes from: the more your team fills in projects and descriptions, the shorter the list of gaps gets from one month to the next.

Plan for a short tuning period in the first month as well. Rates per client, non-billable tags and budgets get clearer as the agent asks questions you had not anticipated. Note your answers in the chat: the agent remembers them for the following months, and later drafts need fewer corrections.

Expect the agent to ask before assuming whenever a client or a rate is unclear.