Time, WIP and recovery

If you bill fixed fees, you can skip this

Most SME compliance work here is priced per client, per year — and the fee book covers that without anybody filling in a timesheet. This chapter is for the two questions a fee book cannot answer.

The question	Where it is answered
What is unbilled right now?	Work in progress
Did the fee cover the work?	Recovery, per client
Where did the week actually go?	Utilisation, per person

Open Time in the practice workspace, between Month-end and Reports.

Before anyone logs an hour: set the rates

Time logged against somebody with no charge-out rate is worth nothing, and your work in progress will read zero no matter how much anybody records.

1. Open Team.
2. Select the person.
3. Under Charge-out rate, enter what an hour of their time is worth.

Only a partner or manager can set a rate — what somebody's time is worth is a commercial fact about the firm, not a personal setting.

Zero is a real answer

Leave it at zero for anyone whose time you never bill by the hour. Their hours still count towards utilisation; they just carry no value.

Logging time

Four fields, and two of them are usually already right.

Field	Notes
Date	Defaults to today
Hours / minutes	Whole minutes. 1h 30m, not 1.5
Client	Or Practice time — see below
What did you do?	The line a client sees if you ever justify a bill

Untick Billable for work you will never charge for. It is still recorded.

Practice time is not a rounding error

Monday meetings, training, a proposal that went nowhere — log it against Practice time. A firm that only records what it can invoice cannot see where its year went, and its utilisation figure is fiction.

Work in progress

The top of the screen, and for most small firms the largest number nobody in the building can state: billable time that has not been invoiced.

Each client shows the hours sitting there and what they are worth. When you raise the bill, select Mark billed on that client and the time leaves work in progress.

Marking billed twice is harmless. A double-click cannot take something out of work in progress that was only invoiced once.

Billed time is frozen

Once time has been marked billed it cannot be edited or deleted. It is a record of what was charged, and quietly changing it behind an invoice is how a firm ends up unable to explain its own numbers.

Correct it with a credit note, the same as any other billing error.

The rate is frozen when you log

Change somebody's charge-out rate and nothing already recorded moves. The rate is copied onto each entry as it is written, exactly as an exchange rate is frozen onto a transaction.

This matters more than it sounds. Re-rating a manager in April must not restate March's work in progress — what the work was worth when it was done is a fact, not a formula to be recalculated.

Recovery: did the fee cover the work?

Time recorded against a client, valued at charge-out, set beside what that client is actually billed.

A firm can carry a loss-making client for years. Recovery is how you find out — usually about three years later than you would have liked.

Read it per client over a period long enough to include a close and a filing. A month is too short; a year hides the trend.

Utilisation, without calling it that

Where the time went shows each person's recorded hours and the share of them that was billable.

The number that should worry you is a senior at 30%. It usually means they are doing work somebody junior should be doing, and no report other than this one will tell you.

What this does not do

Being straight about the edges:

• No timer. Time is entered, not tracked live.
• No approval workflow. A partner can see and correct entries; there is no submit-and-approve cycle.
• No time-based invoicing yet. Marking time billed records that it went onto a bill; it does not raise the bill for you. Use the fee book.

Related

• Fees & billing — the fixed-fee side, which is how most firms here actually charge
• For accounting firms — the manual
• Practice command centre — the working day