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In professional services, time is money. Yet, many organizations face significant revenue leakage due to untracked or poorly tracked billable time.
A study by Tribes.ai reveals that manual time tracking methods result in 1 out of every 5 billable hours being lost. That’s a staggering 20% of your billable hours—and 20% of your potential revenue—gone. And that’s a conservative estimate: other studies have this number as high as 40%!
So, where are the billable hours going? Enter time tracking…
The cost of lost billable hours
Poor time tracking isn’t just an operational inefficiency—it’s a direct threat to your revenue.
The reality is that inconsistent tracking methods, administrative distractions, and outdated processes are letting valuable revenue slip through the cracks without you even noticing. Whether it’s time spent on unrecorded client calls, forgotten tasks, or the inefficiencies of manual systems, every untracked hour adds up. And it means you’re leaving money on the table.
It looks obvious when you write it down, but when time isn’t accurately tracked, client work goes unbilled. Maybe an employee forgot to log a quick task, or someone rounded down their hours because they didn’t have a clear system to record them. Whatever the reason, every missed hour represents lost revenue, and those hours add up quickly.
Think about it: if each team member loses just one billable hour a week, that’s dozens of hours per month that could have been invoiced but weren’t. Over a year, for an organization with multiple employees, this could mean tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars slipping away. That’s money you’ve already earned but can’t collect because it wasn’t documented.
If you’re working in professional services, the reality is you are leaking revenue without even realizing it. And it’s not just us scaremongering…
Overall, the entire professional services industry is seeing $553bn worth of lost billable hours every year.
Beyond just losing revenue, poor time tracking creates a ripple effect on cash flow and financial planning. Without a clear picture of how many hours are billable, it’s harder to predict income, allocate resources, and make informed business decisions.
How to reclaim your lost billable revenue
Remove the use of fragmented tools
Many companies rely on outdated or disconnected systems, forcing employees to juggle multiple platforms. This complexity discourages accurate time entry and makes it harder to reconcile billables with actual work performed – primarily, it makes time tracking an inconvenience.
Users might open Salesforce to monitor customer orders. Then open a project management tool to manage their daily workflows. Over to Outlook for customer communication. Create a spreadsheet to share deadlines with customer stakeholders. Back to Outlook to send. Then finally, to a time tracking solution to record everything. That could be five different applications within a couple of minutes! It’s time lost that could have been spent on billable tasks. More importantly, it’s a preventable headache for anyone having to navigate their way through a field of disparate, unconnected tools just to complete a day’s work.
Remove manual time tracking processes
Manual processes often lead to forgotten or inaccurately recorded time. Employees may delay time entry or provide estimates that fall short of actual hours worked, leading to underbilling. We’ve all seen it – incomplete timesheets, populated in an end-of-week rush using guesstimates, hand-scribbled notes and foggy memory.
Yes, time sheets get populated in the end but the process is fraught with errors. Time tracking is also seen as a burden by employees (and it often is, more on that next!).
Increase time tracking adoption
Time tracking has a bad rep. We get it. It’s admin! But if you want your time tracking to be accurate, that means getting your employees onside. The best way to do that is make the process straightforward.
Some time tracking solutions, like Cloud Coach’s My Day, aim to make time tracking as easy as possible. Entries can be logged in seconds and, using our Genius functionality, suggestions are even recommended to users based on their daily activities within Cloud Coach. We even make it easy to differentiate between billable and non-billable entries!
"My Day is the most unique time entry platform I’ve seen. Those are billable hours. That’s how we get paid!"
Dan Quinn, VP Professional Services, Sovos
Stop losing revenue to poor time tracking
Fixing your time tracking isn’t just about improving processes. It’s about securing the profits you should have already earned. With the right tools and practices, you can capture every billable hour, strengthen your financial stability, and put your business on the path to greater profitability.
If you would like to know more about how Cloud Coach can help you capture every billable hour and stop the revenue leaks, talk to us today for a free consultation.
AUTHOR
Dylan Porteous
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