What are Billable Hours & its Importance in Consulting?

It will ensure faster management of projects by your team and drastically reduce the time spent on non-billable work. An organization that monitors and examines non-billable hours can easily discover trends within the bigger picture. It’s also easier to see the trends in the finer aspects of the business. As much as such activities are vital to how an organization functions, they’re not directly linked to an ongoing project.

The time tracking software allows you to track the time spent by you and your employees on a specific project. Having tracked billable hours once, you will have the needed information to figure out how much time your team needs to deliver certain tasks and projects. It ensures that projects are adequately staffed and completed within the designated timeframes.

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Below we’ll uncover how billable and non-billable hours work for businesses and how you can make those working hours even more valuable. Tracking and recording that time, invoicing for that time, and determining the productivity of that time is far more challenging. You also have client Y, who only required a handful of changes, which resulted in about six non-billable hours. In such instances, it would be better to automate them to lower the number of non-billable hours. This will help you to remain focused on assignments related to billable projects. You’ll be able to identify which administrative task you should spend less time on – and redirect your energy to billable tasks instead.

As consultants need to juggle between multiple clients, their job becomes very stressful. As a result, many consulting organizations face high attrition rates. Clients often engage consulting firms to help them select a specific product or decide on a software solution.

Indicator 4: How cost-effective the project was for the business

With more details on your bills or invoice, you’ll cut down on client disputes. This means you’ll save time, which translates into enhanced billable hours. By using billable hours app and software, you ensure nothing goes unnoticed and that every minute or hour is accounted for. You’ll get the correct picture of the amount of time that your team puts into the project. But you can only get there by analyzing all non-billable time to understand the tasks that take too much time. This includes creating invoices, taking care of administrative duties, and writing reports, among others.

Once you have a salary in mind, divide it by the number of working hours in a year, which is 2,080 hours for a full-time job. Once you have that hourly rate, you may wish to raise it slightly to offset the amount of time you’ll spend working on non-billable tasks, like administrative work and client pitches. Tracking time is not difficult and once you get a hang of it, you will find it to be more useful. Time tracking software like Runn will help you track billable hours more efficiently and accurately. Since some non-billable hours help speed up the project, it is good to track this, so you can know how much non-billable time is required for a particular project. If more non-billable hours are required for a project, you may be working at a loss.

Learn Which Clients Require More Non-Billable Time

So, let’s move on to understand the importance of tracking billable hours for an organization. This is especially important for firms that charge their clients based on an hourly rate. A few examples include freelancers, law firms & legal professionals, accounting firms, and advertising agencies.

While satisfying clients is the primary goal of your business, getting paid duly fuels the passion and ensures business continuity. In addition, you’ll have other expenses to consider – employee development and training, invoicing and bookkeeping activities, company meetings, and more. As a business, you’re responsible for your staff, and that means covering days off (vacation or sick leave) and their salary, regardless if their time was marked as billable or not. Billable hours seem like they should be black and white, but they aren’t always.

What Industries Bill by the Hour?

Please note that depending on the profession, the structure of a billable hour chart may differ. Most people outside the legal world don’t know the difference between the two, but for those who work in law firms, the distinction is critical. Depending on your client agreements and internal policies, billable time may or may not need to be reported on a timesheet. Regardless, timesheets allow for simple billable hours tracking and ensure the accuracy of your billable hours estimate. Excel has a template specifically designed for managing your billable hours. You can input hours worked and pay rate for each client on any given work day, with time-in, time-out tracking.

Rize runs automatically in the background, keeping track of what you’re doing and how much time you’re spending on different activities. A timesheet is a popular visual tool for showing how each hour is being used. Timesheets are tracked manually, typically using a spreadsheet like Excel, but can also be done with pen and paper. What’s important to remember is not to get too caught up in creating and optimizing the tool. Instead, there are plenty of free online templates and resources for tracking your hours so that you can spend more of your time on what’s important. You can also use a billable hours calculator to help expedite the process.

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The best way to do this is to start a timer when you begin and end. If you are more accurate in the number of hours, then you can see a build-up of time at the end of the day. The last thing relevant to tracking billable hours is sending the invoice.

Nevertheless, the total of billable hours you have in a day is the sum of hours worked that can be charged to a client or customer. You need to take how much you’ve worked and multiply it by your hourly rate. As we just explained, billable hours are spent working directly on client projects. Knowing everything about billable hours can be the key for you and your team to save time and improve billing accuracy.

This will help you determine what needs to be done first, what can be delayed, what needs to be done by you, and what can be delegated. Janet Berry-Johnson, CPA, is a freelance writer with over a decade of experience working on both the tax and audit sides of an accounting firm. She’s passionate about helping people make sense of complicated tax and accounting topics. Her work has appeared in Business Insider, Forbes, and The New York Times, and on LendingTree, Credit Karma, and Discover, among others. For example, architects have a number of different ways to bill for their time.

Tracking and automating billable hours also enhances project profit because billing clients would be more accurate. But the good news is that it’s possible to automate some of those tasks that consume your time. Time tracking software or tools help register time where it actually belongs while saving time. It makes it easier to know how many billable and non-billable hours are invested in a project. Then, the data from time trackers can be used for broader calculations as the summarision of work time. At the end of a billing cycle, they gather the information on hours as a whole, as well as billable hours, and create a list of costs that can later be used to charge the customer.

• Customize your billing with the option to set billable rates, depending on the client or job.
• According to the 2021 Legal Trends Report, lawyers spend just 2.5 hours each workday on billable work.
• Thus knowing how, where, and when an organization is spending its resources is important.

These hours are charged to a client according to an agreed hourly rate. In other words, they’re the number of hours a company can charge its clients for doing work on their behalf. Billable hours simplify cooperation between two parties, bringing some definition as to what tasks should get invoiced and compensated and what tasks shouldn’t. If you spend four hours balancing a client’s books, and you’re paid by the hour, you have four billable hours.

Every law firm will use billable hours as a measure of charge for their legal services. In the past, the billable hour model was largely used by legal professionals (for example, a lawyer or attorney, law firms) to calculate their client’s legal fees. Simply put, the term “billable” means something that can be billed or charged.