Time is money in professional services. Ultimately, it all comes down to whether employees are regularly and accurately logging their time, which has a flow-on effect on your project and company reporting. Without accurate time tracking, you won’t know whether your company is viable.

However, employees are often resistant to project time tracking, or struggle to regularly submit their timesheets by the given deadline. Here, we’ll discuss the importance of timesheets, the common issues facing consulting firms, and how to eliminate the problem of late timesheets once and for all with employee time management software.

Why Are Timesheets Important?

Time tracking is crucial to professional services, and has numerous benefits for employees, clients, and the business itself.

Accurately Bill Clients

Reliable and regular consulting time tracking allow you to create invoices that are accurate to the hours worked. This means that you can provide accurate, itemized invoices to your client on a regular basis, and ensure steady cashflow across the lifecycle of the project. Up-to-date time entries in your time management software also ensure that you don’t run into any internal payroll issues.

Monitor Project Performance

By using time entries to calculate hours worked in your project management time tracking software, you can track project cost against the project budget, and make sure that you’re on track for success.

Ensure Project Profitability

By combining employee cost, billable rate, and hours worked (for time & materials projects), you can understand margin by person and overall margin by project and company. This helps you to identify staff and projects that may need more support or intervention.

Track Employee Utilization

By comparing the hours an employee has worked on a billable project against their capacity in your project time management platform, you can gain insights into how well-utilized each employee is at your company. This in turn will allow you to optimize staffing on current and future projects.

Know When to Make Hiring Decisions

The employee utilization data you can derive from consultant time management software lets you plan successful projects through knowing who is available, at capacity, or over-allocated at a glance.

There are many ways to make timesheets easier to regularly complete, including using a time tracking software for consultants like Projectworks that offers digital time entry and a start/stop timer. Simple approval processes will also save you time.

However, despite these helpful features, timesheets remain problematic for many business owners, with employees forgetting or avoiding time entry on a regular basis. Even one missing timesheet can throw a spanner in the works for your professional services business.

How Often Are Timesheets Late In Professional Services?

Despite timesheets being crucial to the efficient operation and profitability of professional services businesses, it’s very common for timesheets to be submitted late.

According to our 2024 Consulting Industry Benchmarking Report, which surveyed professional services staff in the global architecture, engineering, management consulting, and software services industries:

• 22.3% of time entries are submitted after the week they are due.
• If a timesheet is submitted after week-end, it takes an average of 3 days for it to be submitted.
• If a timesheet is submitted after month-end, it takes an average of 7 days for it to be submitted.
• 24.1% of survey respondents feel their timesheets aren’t entered in a timely and accurate manner.
• 6% of time entries are submitted after both week- and month-ends.

Late timesheets are a widespread issue in the professional services field, and negatively affect your profitability. Delayed timesheets prevent you from invoicing your clients on time, limiting your cashflow and having run-on effects on business operations. If time isn’t accurately logged, you can’t make judgments about utilization, productivity, or project performance.

But how do you remind employees to submit timesheets on time?

A Solution for Late Timesheets: Timesheet Reminders

As a platform designed for the professional services industry, we want to make running your business easy, so you can focus on what you do best. In response to these timesheet trends we’ve seen in the industry, we’ve created a new timesheet software feature in Projectworks: timesheet reminders.

What are Timesheet Reminders?

A timesheet reminder is a great tool to remind members of your team to fill out and submit their timesheet for the week. In Projectworks, you have the option to turn on timesheet reminders, which will identify active employees with a billable posting AND who have not yet submitted their timesheet.

You can then establish a schedule (for example, a Friday timesheet reminder) that will send these employees a timesheet reminder email with a link to the current week’s timesheet. A common configuration is to set reminders slightly before and after the deadline for timesheet submission - this way your users are not getting too many emails, but those who have been busy still have a timely reminder to get their timesheets sorted!

These automated reminders make it easy for employees to stay on top of their admin, and save your project managers from chasing employees for their timesheets. If you run multiple organizations, you can configure different uses for timesheet reminders based on the needs of each individual organization.

You can learn how to turn on these timesheet reminders in Projectworks here.

Summary

Late timesheets are a tricky issue in the world of professional services. However, you can minimize their impact with time tracking software tools like digital time entry, start/stop timers, simple approval processes, and timesheet reminders.

Stay in the loop

Want to stay up-to-date with Projectworks product updates as they drop? Make sure to check our Release Notes regularly - we update these every 2 weeks. To get monthly updates straight to your inbox, sign up to our product mailing list.

‍

‍

If you’re not already using Projectworks, why not get started today? Our free trial lets you use all of Projectworks' features for 21 days, no strings attached. Learn how you can grow your business and join hundreds of professional services businesses scaling for success.

‍