A grip on hours,
assignments and profitability
For consultancy and advisory firms, hours are one of the most important production factors. After all, consultants and advisers mainly sell their knowledge, experience and expertise, with the time spent on a client ultimately being the main cost and revenue factor. Reliable time tracking is therefore much more than just a tool for administration or invoicing. By consistently recording hours per customer, assignment and activity, you gain insight into the actual time spent and thus into the progress, costs and profitability of assignments.
Moreover, consultants and advisers often work on several assignments at the same time. On a single day, for example, there may be meetings with different clients, research is carried out, a consultant works on a report and there is an internal meeting about an ongoing project. Some of this work can be charged directly to the client, while other activities are part of general business operations. By recording these activities in a clear and organised way, you get a reliable picture of what the available capacity is actually spent on.
TimeWriter for consultancy and advisory firms
Within an advisory organisation, the ratio between budgeted and actually spent hours can change considerably over the course of an assignment. An assignment that seems to fit well within the available budget at the start can still end up taking considerably more time due to additional questions from the client, extra meetings, changes to the assignment or unexpected work. When this development is only discovered at invoicing or at the end of a project, it is often too late to make adjustments.
With TimeWriter, employees can easily log their hours worked against the right customer, assignment, activity or project. This provides insight into the time actually spent throughout the duration of an assignment. You can then compare the logged hours with the budget or the available hour budget. This makes it visible sooner when an assignment threatens to overrun, so that a timely decision can be made to organise the work differently, make additional agreements with the client or reassess the remaining budget.
From hours worked to insight
Good time tracking gives a consultancy or advisory firm much more information than just the number of hours that ultimately ends up on an invoice. By consistently linking hours to customers, assignments and activities, you can, for example, analyse how much time different consultants spend on an assignment, which parts of a project require relatively much capacity and what share of the available working time is actually billable. This creates a much better picture of how employees and projects use the available capacity.
This information can also be used to further improve business operations. When several assignments show that certain activities structurally take more time than budgeted beforehand, this can be taken into account for new assignments. It also becomes easier to assess which types of assignments or activities deliver an attractive return. Time tracking thus changes from an administrative obligation into an instrument that lets you make better decisions about planning, capacity, rates and future assignments.
Time tracking and invoicing
Many consultancy and advisory firms work with different rates, depending on the employee, expertise or nature of the work. In addition to invoicing based on hours worked, there are also fixed-price agreements, project prices, subscriptions and other contract forms. That is precisely why it is important that the logged time contains enough detail to clearly determine afterwards which work was carried out for which client and how it should be processed.
When employees log their hours as they work, the administration does not have to reconstruct afterwards from diaries, e-mails, spreadsheets or loose notes how much time was spent on an assignment. The logged hours form a reliable basis for further administrative processing. This not only makes invoicing easier, but also reduces the chance that hours worked are forgotten or wrongly attributed to an assignment.
A grip on projects and assignments
An advisory assignment often consists of several parts and, moreover, does not always follow a predefined pattern. A project may, for example, start with an intake and inventory, be followed by research and analysis and ultimately lead to advice, a report or an implementation. In addition, during virtually every assignment there are moments of consultation with the client, internal coordination and preparation. By linking hours to these different activities or project components, you gain insight into the actual distribution of the work.
That insight is particularly valuable when an assignment runs for several months or when different consultants work on the same project. You can then see not only how many hours have been spent in total, but also what these hours went into. This makes it easier to assess the progress of an assignment and to spot any deviations at an early stage. The same information can also be used to keep clients better informed about progress and to budget future projects more realistically.
Post-calculation: learning from previous assignments
For consultancy and advisory organisations, the post-calculation of completed assignments is an important source of information. After all, an original budget is always based on assumptions about the amount of work that will be required. At the end of an assignment, you can use the logged hours to determine how much time was actually needed for, say, research, analysis, meetings, reporting and other activities. By placing these actual figures alongside the original budget, it becomes clear where differences have arisen.
The value of this goes beyond assessing a single completed assignment. When you have historical data from several comparable assignments available, you can estimate ever more accurately how much time certain activities require in practice. This information can then be used for new quotations, project budgets and capacity planning. Reliable time tracking thus helps not only to establish afterwards what an assignment cost, but also to predict future assignments better.
TimeWriter: more than just time tracking
TimeWriter is intended for organisations in which employees spend their time on different customers, projects and activities. In addition to logging hours, the system offers options for, among other things, leave management, invoicing, budget monitoring and reports. This means that the various components of time tracking and its processing can be organised within a single environment, instead of working with separate spreadsheets or records.
Employees can log their hours via the available TimeWriter clients, so that logging does not depend on one specific workplace. For a consultancy or advisory organisation that is practical, because consultants regularly work at customers' premises, are on the road or work on assignments from different locations. The hours can then be processed centrally and used for reports, checks, invoicing and analysis.
Time tracking that fits your advisory practice
Every consultancy organisation has its own way of working. An independent adviser who works mainly on an hourly basis has different logging needs than an advisory firm with dozens of consultants working simultaneously on various long-term projects. The way in which assignments are budgeted and invoiced can also differ greatly. That is why it is important that a time tracking system is not only suitable for recording hours, but also fits the way your organisation organises customers, assignments and activities.
TimeWriter can be set up around the structure of your own organisation. You can log hours against customers, projects and activities and then use this information for day-to-day administration, invoicing, budget monitoring and management information. This creates a single central record of the time spent on assignments within your organisation.
Log hours per customer, assignment and activity. Monitor the progress of your assignments, gain insight into the actual time spent and use your historical data to budget future assignments more accurately.
TimeWriter for consultancy & advisory
A grip on hours. A grip on assignments. A grip on profitability.
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