Time Tracking: Are You Missing Out On $5K+ You’ve Already Earned?

Time Tracking:
Are You Missing Out On $5K+ You’ve Already Earned?

This just occurred with a client of ours, and I thought it would be incredibly beneficial to share.

Here’s the situation: You have an agency which bills (at least some) clients on an hourly basis.

There are 3 main areas you can miss out on billing:

1. The contract doesn’t clearly define billable tasks
2. Your staff doesn’t track/log their time
3. Your staff logs their time, but it is inaccurate

This is GREAT example why ops work is *continuous improvement* and NOT “once and done”

In this example, we’ve been on retainer for operational help with our consulting agency client for 5 months (For reference, our client is trending around $1.5M/year in revenue). Here’s the process we followed in those 5 months.

• Month 1-2: Ensured the contract scope was clear for their clients and created “buckets” of standard activities for each level of client to make a more streamlined proposal and contracting process. 
• Month 3-4: Revitalized their time tracking system and completed a training for the team so they knew how to log their time and the importance. We cross checked to ensure everyone was logging hours as expected. 
• Month 5: Pulled report of all logged data and dug through items marked as not billable to client. Found 5.2% of hours for the month that actually were billable and re-categorized them prior to month end invoicing. Reviewed with team members for moving forward. 
• Result: About $5,000 missed billable hours. $5,000! 
  • To note: not every mis-categorized entry was for an hourly client, as some were on retainer. Even on those retainer clients, the mis-categorization means the profitability by client was off.
    

Here’s the lesson:

• Implementing a process can be a marathon. It is not too often that everything clicks and is fixed on the first go around, and it often takes many iterations of communication.
• There are almost always sub-steps to fix first. 
  • Example from this situation: matching up contracts, getting data set up to be tracked, implementing tracking policy.
• Unless you can run a report and see profitability by client and you know without a doubt it’s accurate… then there is definitely opportunity somewhere.

If you’re in this situation, here’s what you can do:

• Option 1: Follow the steps I listed above to do this for your own company. 
• Option 2: Grab the “how to implement time tracking” to get it set up for your company. It’s still on pre-sale price here! 
• Option 3: We do a walk-through live audit with you to customize the steps specific to you. Contact us here to set it up.
• Option 4: We do it all for you, like we did with this client. Contact us here to learn more.

Whatever it is…

Go get that money. You earned it.