Why is time recording such a chore?
Most fee earners know they should record time as they go. Most do not. The day is broken into short pieces of work across several clients, and stopping to log each one feels like an interruption. So time gets recorded in a batch, at the end of the day, on Friday, or when finance chases the month end.
By then the detail has gone. The fee earner opens their sent items and calendar and works out what they must have done. That piecing together is the work done twice: every piece of client work has already left a record, and the timesheet is a hand-typed copy of it.
What does poor time capture cost a firm?
Two things are lost. The first is the time spent filling in timesheets after the fact. Estimate it per fee earner per week, multiply by your headcount of fee earners, by the charge-out rate, and by the weeks worked in a year.
The second is usually bigger: chargeable work that never gets recorded. A six-minute call not logged, an email drafted in the evening and forgotten, a document reviewed between meetings. You can estimate the leakage by comparing a sample of fee earners' calendars and sent emails for a week against what they actually recorded. The difference, valued at their rates, is revenue the firm did the work for and will never bill. How to calculate unbillable hours walks through the method, and the audit runs it for your firm in about three minutes.
What does a rebuilt time capture process do?
It works from the evidence of the day rather than from memory.
- It gathers the trace. Calendar entries, sent emails, documents opened and saved, and calls logged, from the tools the team already uses.
- It matches work to matters. Each piece of activity is linked to a client and matter using names, reference numbers and email addresses, with anything uncertain left for the fee earner to assign.
- It drafts the narrative. A short description of the work in the style your billing partners expect, so it can go on an invoice without rewriting.
- It asks about the gaps. Where the day has holes, the fee earner is prompted to fill them while they still remember.
At the end of each day the fee earner sees a set of draft entries, confirms or edits them, and submits. Nothing is recorded without their approval.
What will fee earners and finance notice?
Fee earners spend a few minutes a day confirming time rather than an hour at the end of the week rebuilding it. Short pieces of work that used to vanish get recorded, which matters most for people handling many small matters.
Finance stops chasing timesheets before billing. Narratives are consistent and specific, so bills need less editing and clients query fewer entries. Partners get a more accurate view of where time really goes on each matter, which helps with pricing the next piece of work and with invoice preparation.
Which firms lose most time to timesheets?
Firms that bill by the hour, or that track hours against fixed fees to see whether work is profitable. Law firms and accountancy firms are the clearest cases. Engineering consultancies record time against project stages, agencies against retainers and jobs, and managed service providers against tickets and projects.
What do the 30 days involve?
We start by looking at how time is recorded now, which systems hold the trace of a fee earner's day, and how matters are identified. Week one ends with a clear picture of what can be drafted and what cannot. Across weeks two and three the drafting is built and run alongside the existing timesheets of a small group, so their drafts can be compared against what they would have recorded. Week four rolls it out to the wider team with training. We then support it for 30 days. See how we work for the detail.