Forgotten and Rounded Hours On Your Timesheets Are Costing You Revenue
Learn how rounding down hours on your timesheets leads to lost revenue and why switching to dedicated time tracking software is the solution.
Every consultant knows the Friday time tracking ritual: Late afternoon, logging your hours for the week in a spreadsheet, double-checking your calendar to make sure you logged all your meetings, strategy sessions, and focused work time. Then, once the big stuff is logged, trying to remember the little things: answering emails, quick calls, and all of the “hey, do you have a minute?” tasks that happened.
Invariably, hours get left off the timesheet simply because they are forgotten. And when those small tasks are remembered, we tend to “round down” the hours spent, because it feels more defensible when we’re not sure. If a consultant thinks they were on a call for 41 minutes, but is not 100% sure, they will log it as 30 minutes. One instance of this “rounding down” might just seem like a small administrative overhead, but over the course of a month, it is costing your firm 10-15% in lost revenue every month, for every consultant.
The Financial Impact of Manual Time Tracking
Let’s use a conservative example of a consultant who fails to log 6 minutes of billable time per day. If that consultant is billing $200 per hour, that is $100 per week, or $5,000 per year in lost revenue. Multiply that over a team of 10 consultants, and that’s $50,000 in lost revenue – work that was done but not charged for.
Using more realistic numbers, your lost revenue is much higher – most studies show that moving from manual time tracking in spreadsheets to real-time tracking recovers 10-15% of billable time.Using the conservative estimate above, that would equate to $40,000 in lost revenue per year, per consultant. For the team of 10, that's $400,000 per year in lost revenue for your firm, simply by not using real-time tracking.
Capture and Keep Your Lost Revenue With PSA Software
Recovering the revenue lost to manual time tracking starts with removing the administrative friction caused by spreadsheets. Every time a consultant starts and stops work, they have to open a file and manually enter data, so those small tasks like answering an email or Slack message don’t get logged.
Using a dedicated PSA solution like Projectworks enables consultants to track their work in real-time, ensuring that 42 minutes of work is billed as 42 minutes, not rounded down to 30. Consultants can work freely without the Friday afternoon memory test, where hours are simply forgotten and not logged, or rounded down because of uncertainty. Every minute of work is linked to the correct project, ensuring that consultants aren’t logging hours into non-billable admin codes.
Capturing your lost revenue and increasing efficiency will enable your firm to scale. In addition, implementing a dedicated PSA solution for time tracking is also a strategic financial decision.
Using Projectworks for your time tracking, your recovered revenue pays for the software within the first week ($100/week lost revenue per consultant, software cost of $40/month per consultant) at our top tier plan.
Ready to capture that lost revenue? Start your free trial of Projectworks today, or let us demo Projectworks for you, and see how easy accurate time tracking can be.
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