Manage Your Project Resources’ Billable Hours with Clear Targets
If time is your most precious resource, what comes in a close second? The resources themselves — your people. When your time and resources are managed optimally, you’ll likely see an increase in hours billed…and in your bottom line. Defining clear targets is key to managing billable hours and stopping revenue leakage, but if you need some help along the way, Replicon’s TimeBill is your solution to ensure error-free billing and get big-picture insight into your project’s time, utilization, and service delivery.
Here’s how TimeBill can help you track, target, and increase billable errors to ensure your resources are always operating at peak performance.
Understanding the Difference Between Billable and Nonbillable Hours
First, we need to clarify something that often becomes a sticking point on teams in the midst of a project. Billable hours do not equate to “hours worked.” While that would be a tidy and simple definition, it’s simply incorrect. To further complicate matters, there really are no set rules on what constitutes a billable hour. There are, however, best practices that you can apply to your own projects.
Billable Hours: These are typically clearly defined hours that go directly to the project, including planning, research, meetings, and revisions. A good rule of thumb: if you think a client will question it if you put it on an invoice, you’d better think twice.
Nonbillable Hours: These hours may be connected to a project, but they aren’t technically part of the scope of work. This may include conversations and communications between team members, administrative tasks, training, marketing and advertising, and networking and prospecting.
Want to learn more about the differences between billable and nonbillable hours, and how to find the right balance? Download our ebook for tips and advice.
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How to Set Clear Targets to Maximize Billable Hours
So, how do you manage billable hours to increase revenue and keep your project on target? TimeBill has you covered. Here’s how you can utilize this feature of our time tracking platform to maintain accuracy and deliver projects on time and on budget.
Don’t Ignore Nonbillable Hours
If we’re talking about billable hours, why worry about nonbillable ones that aren’t making you money? The reason is actually pretty simple. When you understand how your team is spending its time – ALL its time – you can make informed decisions that ultimately lead to project success. By tracking both billable and nonbillable hours for your entire team and for individual team members, you can begin to identify areas of improvement. You may find your team is spending too much time meeting and not enough time doing. Or you may uncover gaps in individual members’ skill sets that slow them down and prevent them from tackling revenue-generating work.
What you need is a time tracking platform that allows you to track and manage both billable and nonbillable hours in real time. TimeBill provides just that, giving you in-the-moment insight into how projects progress in comparison to time spent by employees. This instantaneous visibility into the data will allow you to make swift and informed decisions to reduce nonbillable time.
Scrutinize Your Utilization Rates
Are your resources operating at optimal levels? Are they efficient and productive, or is time slipping through the cracks? To know for sure, you need to have constant visibility into resource utilization. Once you understand how your employees are using their time, and how that stacks up to the outlined targets, you can better predict outcomes and take preventative measures against impending issues.
With TimeBill, you can set target productivity at the individual, project, or team level, so you always have an eye on resource utilization. Manage team members’ availability to ensure they’re staying on task and meeting goals, as well as quickly allocate new projects and ensure employees are spending their time on billable work and higher-revenue projects.
Leverage Intelligent Approval Workflows
If your team members are devoting too much of their time to nonbillable work, you need to be at the ready to nip it in the bud. With real-time insight into time tracking and utilization, you’ll always know when hours are being misused, or worse, lost. With instant approvals and validations, you can let your employees know when they’re on the right track…and when they’re not.
TimeBill’s intelligent approval capabilities allow you to model and build custom workflows for each client. Real-time alerts keep everyone from employees to supervisors to stakeholders in the loop. And multi-level approvals ensure you’re billing accurately every time.
Make Time Tracking Intuitive and Easy
Filling out timesheets isn’t only tedious, it’s a time-suck that eats away at your billable hours. When you need employees to focus on productivity, the last thing you want is to sideline them with manual timesheets that take them out of the game and slow down your approval process. Automated tracking reduces the burden on your team, and offers numerous benefits.
Our configurable timesheets simplify the process by giving your resources flexible options for tracking their time and giving you instant access to key data so you always know when you’re on-target for billable hours. Features like pre-populated timesheet rules, GPS tracking, and mobile and AI capabilities ensure your team can accurately and easily track their time from anywhere.
Make Data-Driven Decisions in Real Time
If you’ve got a problem with revenue leakage or time loss, you need to be prepared to act swiftly. Setting clearly defined billable hour targets at the individual, department, or business level will help you head these issues off at the pass. But if problems do arise, you’ll need both in-the-moment visibility combined with historical trends to make the right call.
With TimeBill, you’ll be able to see real-time billable target progress and historical data in a single, easy-to-use dashboard. Share this advanced reporting with supervisors and executives so they can always be in-the-know, and customize with key business metrics so you can be ahead of the curve and make proactive decisions.
Managing billable hours among your resources benefits from setting clear targets and utilizing the tools you have at hand. TimeBill is just one feature of many in Replicon’s robust and comprehensive project time tracking suite. If you want to learn more about how TimeBill can give you insight into your resources’ billable hours, see a demo.
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