Billable hours are used in several professional fields. However, keeping track of billable hours can be a difficult task. Many different companies benefit from billable hours. In addition, employees are sometimes required to meet certain quotas. As a result, increasing efficiency and production is crucial.
No one wants their hard effort to go to waste. However, the advantages of keeping track of billable hours should never be ignored. Many agencies, consulting firms, and software shops use billable hours to get compensated for services. Time is money, as they say, and billable hours are the link between the two.
What are billable hours?
The term “billable hours” might be confusing for some because employees in many different jobs pay for their work through means of invoicing. Jobs like freelancers and building contractors work similarly to billable hours. However, this is not the same thing. Billable hours are only required in a small number of industries. Attorneys, for example, must accomplish a certain number of billable hours each week. Failure to meet the quota could result in some consequences.
By definition, billable hours are hours worked for which you are paid. In other words, they are hours you bill your clients and for which they spend you directly. These payments do not apply to different job activities performed for the firm to which they are professionally associated for lawyers, accountants, consultants, and other professionals doing billable work. Employers bill clients for different personnel at different rates. Billable hours are the safest approach to connecting your job to the client. Billing clients by the amount of time you spend instead of a fixed price is less risky and ensures a more significant project profit. It is a common statistic in It consulting and legal organizations, as well as other industries where quantifying how much time staff spend working for clients, is vital.
Billable hours mainly apply solely to clients. They are intended to compensate employees for time spent on individual customer cases. In most circumstances, the client is responsible for paying the cost. As a result, billable hours are tremendously profitable for businesses. Client charges must be sufficient to cover the employee’s salary and other business expenditures. Therefore, calculating a reasonable rate is critical, especially for companies that rely on client income for most or all of their revenue.
Differences between billable hours and non-billable hours
So we understand the need to keep track of our billable hours. But with such hectic work schedules, how can we properly distinguish between billable and non-billable hours?
Billable:
- Client communication
- Making preparations for a client
- Client emails
- Client updates and revisions
- Client’s project research
- Phone calls
- Text messaging
- Video conferences
Non-billable
- Marketing for businesses
- Internal team meetings and emails
- Events for networking or training
- Business planning
- Client growth or interacting with new clients
- Administrative duties
The significance of keeping track of billable hours
You might be questioning if tracking them is necessary. Yes, without a doubt! For one thing, tracking billable hours can provide you with helpful business indicators that you can utilize to make future projects more successful. Billable hours are tracked so that you can check:
1. How effective was your team
Calculating billable hours will let you see how productive your team was on the project, whether it’s your full-time employees who give services to clients and partners or freelancers you bring in to work on your projects. You can measure the percentage of billable work and notice early on if someone is working overtime and if anything is taking up too much of their time. Additionally, you will be able to observe how correct all of your early estimates were during project planning.
2. How long it took to complete a task or project
After you’ve recorded billable hours, you’ll have the data to figure out how much time your team will need to complete specific tasks and projects. This ensures it will be easier for you to estimate tasks accurately and plan project resources effectively, which will improve the precision of your budgeting, workload management, and resource management processes.
3. How much funding the project took
Managing billable hours effectively can assist you in determining how much time, money, and other resources are needed for a particular project. In addition, you obtain specific statistics that will help you make quick and effective judgments when planning future projects and selecting clients to collaborate with, rather than struggling with rough estimates.
4. How you can make future projects more successful
Tracking makes it easy to figure out what you need to do to improve the profitability and success of future collaborations and initiatives. It gives a baseline in which you may compare future planning to see what results you can expect. It will also assist you in avoiding specific hazards and risks in future projects, mainly if you can track your billable hours using the software.
Alliance Global Solutions is the key
With Alliance Global Solutions, you can have a clear picture of how much time your team invests in projects by making efforts to measure billable hours. Automatically tracking all billable and non-billable hours will give you better control over your projects and resources, allowing you to gain insights into team productivity and demand. You get to essentially rethink your resource management techniques, deter internal patterns, and boost project profitability. You’ll be ready to optimize everything from processes to invoicing if you know which tasks represent billable hours and how to keep track of them.