Billable Hours Tracking: Common Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2024

When it comes to billing your clients, you must know which time is chargeable, this is known as billable hours tracking and is an essential element for any business. This concept helps you categorize budgets into high-value and low-value, which is decided by the time-spent working along with the pay. Moreover, this must be almost perfectly done, otherwise, you can incur heavy losses. Here’s Billable Hours Tracking: Common Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2024

Something about billable hours

In simple words, this is your valuable time you used to work for your clients and can directly charge them for. For example, paid client meetings, writing client copy, etc. However, billable hours are not always generated in hours. In such cases, use the table below.

know about non-billable hours as well

It is obvious that non-billable time is simply the opposite of billable time. These are your valuable hours for which the client will not pay. For instance, taking client calls, answering emails, etc.

Why is it important to track this time?

The bottom-line is to not have more non-billable hours. Otherwise, you are incurring more loses. Moreover, Billable Hours Tracking is essential because:

• You charge the right amount for your time.
• You can use it to track productivity, helping you identify whether the tasks are being completed within the timeline or not.
• Tracking these hours skyrocket profitability as you identify and prioritize high valued tasks.
•  You can minimize or eliminate wasting time by identifying and decreasing non-billable tasks.
• Keep your team relaxed by accurately scheduling resources.
• Tracking billable hours makes it easier to know when your team is available. The idea is to calculate the time required for the project.
• Tracking billable hours ensures fair payment to employees.

The slip-ups to avoid when monitoring billable hours

Tracking billable time, the right way and making bills for clients with the correct amount is necessary. However, mistakes can happen at times, especially when you are not using time tracking software.

1. Inconsistency
2. Underestimating non-billable work
3. Failure in recording billable time
4. Ignoring leakage in billable time
5. Non-prioritization of communication and transparency
6. Solo reliance on manual tracking

1. Inconsistency: Irregularities and omissions in billable hours tracking can lead to a major issue, resulting in inaccurate invoices. These can further hinder client relationships and financial losses.

2. Underestimating non-billable work: These hours include essential but non-client facing work. Please remember that not tracking non-billable hours may lead to inaccurate project budgeting.

3. Failure in recording billable time: Here, we are referring to improper documentation of billable time, and it can put serious backlashes on your organization. Simply put, it boosts the chances of billing errors, leading to setbacks and may also hinder your relationship with even the oldest clients of your company.

4. Ignoring leakage in billable time: Simply put, it is not accounting some of the chargeable work hours. This mistake becomes a major issue, resulting in lost revenue, decreased profits, damaging your company’s finances and overall success.

5. Non-prioritization of communication and transparency: Clarity is the key element in strengthening client relationships. When you are open about payable time and project progress, you gain more trust. It’s as simple as that. However, when these don’t have the top priority, it is not good for your organization.

6. Solo reliance on manual tracking: Not using a Billable Hours Tracker is the biggest mistake any employee will make. Doing so generates many issues.

• Human error
• Omitting certain billable hours
• Inconsistency in calculations
• Lacking clarity
• Depthless or foolish analysis     

That’s why to optimize billable hours, you need an application such as DeskTrack.

Complications in Billable Hours Tracking

Billable hours are as simple as they sound. The idea is to bill the clients for the amount of time you worked. To calculate this amount, you multiply your work time utilization with your hourly rate. However, this gets complicated, if and when:

• If you request varying fees from all your clients.
• You have assigned a diverse team to your project, with each member getting a different pay.

You need to consider and put in all these factors in your procedure to optimize billable hours. However, doing it manually, as we mentioned before will cause problems such as human error. That’s when software assistance comes in handy. Overall, using software is one of the best practices for tracking time.

The best applications for Billable Hours Tracking

Using Time Tracking Software to track billable hours minimizes the chances of error. As a bonus, it also automatically and speedily calculates the amount, saving you valuable time. Below we have mentioned 5 of the best applications for this job.

1. DeskTrack
2. Accelo
3. ClickTime
4. Harvest
5. QuickBoots Time

1. DeskTrack: The first one on our list is DeskTrack, which is a time tracking, and screen monitoring software.

• An easy to use application for accurately and Efficiently Tracking Time.
• It is the best software for Tracking Profitability.
• And of course for calculating non-billable and billable hours.

2. Accelo: The second application on our list of Billable Hours Tracking software is Accelo, which is a client work management software. Designed for all agencies, big or small, it can assist you in many tasks from managing client relationships and prospecting to payment via projects and retainers.

3. ClickTime: When it comes to this software, the primary focus remains on timesheets, expenses, and business intelligence. The application’s various tools can assist your staff with capacity planning, utilization monitoring, profitability analysis, and much more.

4. Harvest: The next Billable Hours Tracker is Harvest. The application offers time-tracking, expense management and invoicing assistance. The software supports all categories of businesses and has a few good elements, we have mentioned below.

• Easy to read reports.
• Good for making data-driven decisions.
• It makes it easy to track billable hours and monitor work time utilization.

5. QuickBoots Time:  Another time tracking and staff scheduling application would be this one. The tool integrates with other software from its developers to make payroll and client billing simpler, best for teams, who are looking for a client invoice attached with insightful time tracking and reports.

Conclusion

Our article named, Billable Hours Tracking: Common Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2024. In this blog, we learned a brief about non-billable and billable time and the importance of monitoring it. followed by avoidable mistakes during billable hours tracking. Finally, we suggested some applications to optimize the same. We hope this article was helpful for you and will benefit your company a lot.