Logging hours without the pain: the basis of profitability

In a consultancy, what isn’t logged is neither billed nor learned from. Seven practices to stop timesheets from being the chore everyone postpones.

Almost every consultancy knows how many hours it sold. Many don’t know how many hours it actually worked, or on what. The result is familiar: proposals reuse estimates that keep missing, projects look profitable until the close-out review, and time-based billing depends on the memory of whoever fills in the sheet on Friday at six.

The problem is rarely the tool. It is the habit, and habits are built with simple rules.

1. Short, frequent entry, not monthly

A week can be remembered; a month gets invented. Pick a fixed moment (Friday before leaving, or Monday morning) and protect it. Ten minutes every week is more accurate than an hour of archaeology on close-out day.

2. One place, shaped like a spreadsheet

People log best where they already feel at home: a row per project or task, a column per day, keyboard-driven. If logging three hours takes four screens, it gets postponed. The fewer the clicks, the more honest the data.

3. Define what a “project hour” is and isn’t

Decide once what counts as billable, what as internal (proposals, training, admin) and what as pre-sales. Without that rule every consultant classifies differently and reports can’t be compared.

4. Log against the project, and the task when it matters

The project is the minimum. The task helps when you want to learn: how long discovery, configuration or testing really took. With that, the next estimate stops being an opinion.

5. Separate what was logged from what was approved

Have someone other than the reporter review and approve the week. Anyone who bills by the hour knows it: the gap between logged hours and approved hours is the gap between a debatable invoice and a defensible one. And nobody should approve their own hours.

6. A reminder that only bothers whoever should be bothered

A weekly nudge to the whole team gets ignored. Remind only people who have work to report on and haven’t submitted their week, just once. If the reminder reaches people with nothing to log, soon nobody reads any of them.

7. Close the loop with the budget

Logged hours pay off when compared with the plan: estimated hours times rate against actual time. If nobody sees that comparison during the project, logging becomes a chore. Review the variance every week or fortnight, not at the end.

How it looks in Iurefficient

The “My hours” section follows this pattern: a sheet where each row is a project (and optionally a task) and each column a day of the week, keyboard-driven, with totals per day and per week against your workday, saved in one go; clearing a cell deletes that hour. When done, you submit the week for approval: your supervisor approves it or returns it with a reason, and nobody approves their own hours, not even an administrator. If you haven’t submitted the week that just closed, the system reminds you on Monday, once, and only if you have work to report on. A submitted week can be withdrawn while nobody has decided on it. Logged hours feed the actual cost in the project’s Budget tab. Teams that don’t track hours can switch the section off in Settings.

consulting hours profitability PMO best practices

← Back to the index