The firm that found 5% more billable time it was already working
In most firms, real billable work quietly never reaches a timesheet. Here is the time-capture system we build and the roughly $88,000 a year it typically recovers, without anyone working an extra hour.
No client outcome is claimed. The figure below is a modeled scenario; inspect the assumptions before applying it to your business.
- Modeled Year-1 savings
- $88,000
- Billable recovered
- +5%
- Captured at
- The source
- Build time
- 9 days
Representative build. This describes a system we build and the numbers typical for it, drawn from published benchmarks and our baseline model. Verified, client-signed studies will replace representative ones as permissions land.
The work that never reached a timesheet
Ask a partner how much of last month’s work made it onto a timesheet and you will get an uncomfortable pause. The honest answer, in most firms, is “not all of it.” A six-minute call between meetings. An email answered on the way home. A quick review squeezed in before lunch. Each is real, billable work. Each is easy to forget by the time someone sits down at the end of the week to reconstruct their day from memory.
Reconstruction is the enemy. Time recorded hours or days later is time rounded down, or lost entirely. And because the people forgetting are the most expensive in the building, the leak is expensive too.
What it costs, worked at one size
Take a boutique firm with a handful of fee-earners billing at professional rates:
- Unbilled time: the dominant line. Recovering even 5% of billable hours that were genuinely worked but never captured is worth around $70,000 a year at this size. Nobody works longer; the work was already done.
- Write-downs: vague or late entries that get discounted at review because no one can defend them, ~$10,000/yr.
- Labor: fee-earners reconstructing timesheets from memory at the end of each week, ~$5,000/yr of the most expensive time in the firm spent on admin.
- Opportunity: that same senior time pulled off client work, ~$3,000/yr.
About $88,000 a year, almost all of it revenue the firm has already earned and simply failed to record.
What we build
- Capture at the source: time gets logged where the work happens, from calls, calendar entries, documents, and email, as it happens, not reconstructed later.
- Draft entries for review: the system proposes narratives and durations tied to the right matter; the fee-earner confirms or adjusts in seconds instead of inventing from scratch.
- A gentle daily prompt so nothing waits until Friday, when detail has already evaporated.
- A pre-bill view that surfaces gaps and thin days before invoices go out, while there is still time to remember.
Every judgment about what is billable stays with a person. The system removes the friction of recording, not the discretion over what to record. Live in about nine days.
What changes
Captured billable time rises by around 5%, purely because less of it slips through. Write-downs fall, because entries are specific and contemporaneous. Fee-earners stop losing an hour each week to timesheet archaeology. The firm bills for the work it actually did, which is the least controversial revenue there is.
Why it generalizes
Accountants, consultancies, agencies, any firm that bills for expert time runs a version of this leak, and it always comes from the same place: time recorded late is time lost. Once capture-at-the-source is built, it adapts cleanly to the next firm’s practice-management stack. If your fee-earners reconstruct their week from memory, some of your revenue is evaporating quietly. Let us measure how much; the audit is free.