Billable Hours: What Are They and How to Calculate Them

By:rootCategories: Bookkeeping

calculating billable hours

Next, you should keep track of the total hours spent on a project to report to the client and bill them for it. Divide your annual income goals (the annual income you expect) with the annual billable hours https://www.bookstime.com/articles/back-office-accounting (the sum of payable working hours in a year). You should follow a specific, streamlined process to calculate every billable hour accurately.

calculating billable hours

Configure Workstatus For Your Business Needs:

  • This analysis enables them to identify high-value clients and projects.
  • I wondered how the quality of their work could be maintained when they were eight or nine hours into an 11-hour day.
  • This varies across specific roles, with junior-level staff having the highest utilization (75%), and director roles having the lowest (33%).
  • In summary, the total number of billable hours in a year depends on various factors such as working days, working hours per day, utilization rate, and holidays.
  • Understanding billable hours helps you structure your time management and ensure you’re compensated fairly for your work when billing clients.
  • Visualizing estimated vs actual time tracked helps easily identify bottleneck tasks so you can take action before they derail a project.
  • Workstatus provides robust capabilities for analyzing billable hours data, allowing businesses to overcome the limitations of traditional reporting methods.

Non-billable hours let you track time that can’t be invoiced to your client. This time-tracking feature is useful for assessing your productivity and understanding how much time you devote to tasks that can’t be billed to any clients. Non-billable hours are spent working on tasks not directly related to client projects. Even though this work may be necessary for running your business, it’s not required to complete a particular client project, so it can’t be billed to the client.

  • It also offers a clear view of project profitability and productivity.
  • By outsourcing the process, you can free up your staff’s time, which they can use in pursuing other activities that generate revenue.
  • It helps build transparent client relationships, invoice accurately, and assess profitability.
  • Professionals can’t bill their employers or clients for all the time you spend on the project, but tracking non-billable hours is as important as billable ones.
  • Tour the product and try Scoro for free for 14 days, no credit card required.
  • My boss told me the firm was so deeply entrenched in the hourly billing system that it would be too hard to pivot.
  • Even though this work may be necessary for running your business, it’s not required to complete a particular client project, so it can’t be billed to the client.

How long does it typically take to implement PSA software?

Open the “Heatmap” dropdown menu to evaluate capacity by remaining hours or booked hours. And use the “Grouped by” dropdown to view bookings by roles or individuals. Green shows how much time has been booked, and white reflects the remaining time. Scoro’s “Quoted vs Actual” table can be used to get an objective view of how much time your team will need. So, you’re less likely to blow through money on labor costs and compromise your profitability.

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calculating billable hours

Freelancers calculate billable hours to charge clients for their time working on projects. Tracking billable hours throughout a project ensures a client is charged correctly when it’s time to invoice and prevents under or overbilling. A law firm might use legal practice management software that includes built-in time-tracking software. Accounting software like FreshBooks also includes time-tracking features. Accurate invoicing reduces the likelihood of a payment dispute and payroll builds trust with your client. This can encourage more business in the future since your client can easily see that your company uses its billable hours effectively.

To stay successful, businesses must adapt to change while their customers are happy and making a profit. Therefore, Tara can invoice her client for $2,000 for the work completed during the month. If no response is registered within 60 seconds of showing the pop-up, the time tracker stops on its own. Additionally, Time Doctor what are billables also has a feature to track idle time on your computer. However, depending on your business’s type and size, you can also invoice weekly or fortnightly.

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