Untracked Micro-Tasks Are Draining Your Revenue

‍Tracking billable hours seems like a straightforward process: the time spent on planning, producing strategy documents, and development are measured in hours and fairly easy to remember when updating timesheets. Even the smaller tasks like a 30-minute client call are usually logged accurately.

But during the course of the work day, there are countless short-duration “micro-tasks” that consultants perform that are billable, but do not make it onto the timesheet. Answering an email from a client, responding to Slack messages, or a quick phone call to clarify details on a deliverable repeatedly slip through the cracks when billable time is calculated.

These short, 5 minute tasks are not only easy to forget, they seem like a waste of time to log. If it takes longer to log those tasks than it does to perform them, is that an efficient use of a consultant’s time?

How Much Revenue Is Lost To Untracked Micro-tasks?

If a consultant forgets or otherwise decides to not log 6 billable micro-tasks per day, at 5 minutes per micro-task, that adds up to 10 hours per month of unbilled work, per consultant. At a billable rate of $200 per hour, that is $2,000 per month that is not billed. For a team of 10 consultants, that’s $240,000 of lost revenue annually for your firm.

Time Tracking With Spreadsheets Is The Root Cause

Manually logging hours in a spreadsheet makes tracking these micro-tasks a time-consuming pain. It not only consumes a disproportionately large amount of time relative to the task, but it interrupts the flow of work from one micro-task to another, reducing productivity. Consultants don’t want to stop what they are doing to track a 5-minute phone call, they want to remember and apply what they learned on the call to project work. And by the time Friday afternoon rolls around, timesheets get updated for the week and those micro-tasks have been forgotten.

PSA Software Eliminates The Friction

Dedicated time-tracking software like Projectworks was designed to remove the friction of tracking billable micro-tasks and recovering that lost revenue. Features like start/stop timers and automated reminders make tracking 5-minute micro-tasks a one-click process. And having up-to-the-minute time tracking data means you can finally get an accurate view into project burn rate, utilization and capacity forecasts. The detail captured by automated time tracking software is also translated directly into your invoices for transparent billing, increasing client trust while reducing admin overhead.

Maximizing your consulting firm’s revenue starts with capturing every billable minute, not just the hours. A dedicated PSA software solution like Projectworks is a core pillar of an efficient, scalable and profitable consulting business. You can start capturing that lost revenue from untracked micro-tasks today by signing up for a free trial of Projectworks, or let us demo Projectworks for you.

‍