Why timesheets get reconstructed on Friday, and how to stop it
Nobody is lying. Human recall of a working day decays within hours, and every agency's data quietly reflects that. What to change so the numbers describe the week that happened.
Writing
Notes on billing by the hour
Utilization, effective hourly rate, scope creep, pricing models, and how to get a team to track time without anybody resenting it. No listicles.
How to calculate agency utilization rate (and the number to aim for)
Utilization is the most quoted and least understood number in agency operations. Here is the formula, the benchmarks, and the three ways the calculation goes quietly wrong.
Read it →A timesheet approval process people don't resent
Approvals exist to protect the invoice, not to police the team. The difference shows up in what the approver is actually looking at.
Catching scope creep before it eats the retainer
Scope creep is rarely one big unreasonable request. It is forty small ones, none of which was worth an argument, and the only reliable detector is a number you check monthly.
What an hour of your team actually costs
Salary divided by 2,080 is the wrong answer, and it is wrong in the direction that loses money. Here is how to work out the number you should be pricing against.
Effective hourly rate: the number that tells you a retainer has gone wrong
Your rate card says $150 an hour. Effective hourly rate is what you actually got. The gap between the two is where agency margin quietly disappears.
Billable vs non-billable: where agency time actually goes
The four arguments every agency has about what counts as billable, why the answers matter less than the consistency, and what a healthy non-billable split looks like.
How to tell whether a project actually made money
Revenue minus obvious costs is not profitability. Here is the calculation that includes the parts agencies routinely leave out, and when to run it.
How to track billable hours without hating it
Most time tracking advice assumes the problem is discipline. It usually is not — it is that the system asks for more precision than the work can supply.
Why we don't build screenshots
Several tools in this category will photograph your team's screens every ten minutes. We have decided not to build that, and it is worth saying why rather than leaving it as a gap in a feature list.
Rolling out time tracking without a mutiny
The first ninety days decide whether you get useful data or a compliance exercise. A practical sequence, and the three mistakes that poison it on day one.
Choosing a tool rather than reading about the theory? Our comparison pages put us next to sixteen competitors with dated prices and an honest note on what each one does better than we do.
Numbers like these, without the spreadsheet
Utilization, effective hourly rate and project margin, straight out of tracked time.
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