The hours you spent in meetings are the ones you forget to bill

An automatic tracker watches the machine in front of you, which means the ninety minutes you spent on a client call with your laptop shut are invisible to it. Your calendar knows about those ninety minutes. Connect it and BillNotch reads the last two weeks of meetings, throws away everything that was not real work, and offers you the rest on the Review screen to accept or wave away.

calendar.events.readonly · past 14 days · primary calendar

The one request BillNotch makes to Google

It is worth stating precisely, because a calendar is a private thing and “we integrate with Google Calendar” tells you nothing. There is exactly one endpoint in the code — calendars/primary/events — asked for a window that starts fourteen days ago and ends now. Nothing in the future is requested. No other calendar id is ever substituted for primary.

The request sets singleEvents=true, which is Google’s instruction to expand a recurring series into its individual occurrences. That is why a daily standup arrives as ten separate suggestions you can accept and dismiss one by one, rather than one series you would have to reason about. Results come back ordered by start time, 250 at a time, and BillNotch follows the page tokens until Google stops handing them out.

Google’s own fields decide what survives

No heuristics, no title parsing, no guessing from who was invited. Four fields on the event as Google returns it do the whole job, which means you can predict the outcome from inside Google Calendar before you ever open BillNotch.

Two more rules run after those. Anything shorter than five minutes or longer than twelve hours is treated as something other than a meeting and discarded. And a meeting whose slot already overlaps time you tracked is never offered at all, so the desktop app and the calendar can never both claim the same hour — if you sat in a video call with the tracker running, the calendar has nothing to add.

The consent screen, and what Workspace admins control

Open Settings → Calendar and press Connect Google Calendar. Google shows you the account picker and then one consent screen listing read-only access to calendar events and your email address. The authorisation request asks for offline access and forces the consent prompt, which is the part that makes Google issue a refresh token — without it the connection would quietly stop working after an hour and you would have no idea why.

On a Google Workspace domain, whether that consent screen appears at all is your administrator’s call: Workspace can restrict which third-party apps may hold calendar scopes. That is a Google Admin console setting, not a BillNotch permission, and there is nothing to request on our side. Inside BillNotch the connection is personal — every member connects their own account, nobody sees anybody else’s meetings, and no admin role is involved.

What accepting a meeting actually does

It creates a real time entry — not a draft — whose description is the meeting title and whose start and end are the meeting’s own. You can pick a project on the row before you accept. The entry is created non-billable, so putting it on an invoice is a second, conscious decision; a calendar is not evidence of billable work and BillNotch does not pretend otherwise.

Dismissing a meeting removes it from the list permanently and does nothing to your calendar. The accept itself is guarded, so two tabs cannot both turn one meeting into two entries; the loser of that race has its duplicate entry rolled back rather than left behind.

When it reads, and what it keeps

Only when you look. Opening the Review screen triggers a sync, and pressing Sync now forces one, but a connection will not re-read Google more than once every fifteen minutes. There is no background job polling your calendar overnight and no push channel subscribed to it: if you never open BillNotch, BillNotch never reads your calendar.

Four fields per meeting are stored — Google’s event id, the title, the start and the end. Descriptions, locations, attendee lists, organisers and Meet links are not requested and not kept. Of the credentials, only the refresh token is written down, encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a key derived for that single purpose; the short-lived access token is never persisted at all. Revoke access from your Google Account and the Calendar card says so plainly and offers Reconnect, rather than showing a healthy connection that has silently stopped returning meetings.

What it will not do

It will not write a single character back to Google, will not read your upcoming week, and will not touch a calendar other than your primary one. It does not detect Meet or Zoom links, does not know who else was in the room, and does not guess a client from an attendee’s email domain. The AI categorizer does not run on accepted meetings either: a meeting with no project chosen stays without one until you say.

The provider list is short. Outlook and Microsoft 365 are the only alternative; Apple Calendar, CalDAV and subscribed ICS feeds are not supported.