However, the manual method is not the perfect solution to calculate billable hours. Create projects, categorize them by clients, and create tasks on each. As attorneys worked faster, they reported higher client satisfaction – and those satisfied clients referred more clients. Additionally, firms were able to retain work they’d otherwise contract out to a third party, leading to profit boosts as well.

• By billing in standard time increments and using an attorney billable hours chart, you can spend less time trying to calculate your billable hours manually.
• While you can use manual methods to track and calculate billable hours, they can be inaccurate and unreliable.
• In this article, we’ll explore everything you should know about calculating your billable hours.
• It might seem silly in the moment to track a five-minute phone meeting or the two minutes it takes to send a work email.

Every freelancer, law firm, professional services firm, or small business owner needs to understand the importance of tracking billable hours. Attorneys track billable time more than any other industry, and with good reason. Attorneys working in a law firm are required to work a minimum number of billable hours each year, with consequences such as termination a possibility if they don’t. It might seem silly in the moment to track a five-minute phone meeting or the two minutes it takes to send a work email. But all those small increments of billable time can add up to a significant number of billable hours over the span of an entire project. Track every minute you spend working on a client’s project to increase your billable hours.

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So, if anything urgent needs to be addressed, you can see to it right away. This will also help you plan for the following day and decrease your non-billable hours. By tracking all your time (non-billable time included), your working day will be more productive, and you can be more efficient. Your billable hours target doesn’t have to be a fixed fee and can alternate from client to client. Billable hours help you track the number of hours spent on any given task or project each working day. You calculate utilization by dividing the total hours worked during the year by billable time.

Amberlee McGaughey, a librarian in Pennsylvania, was not worried about the restart of student loan payments. Set estimates in time or money for your client projects, track their billing progress, and get alerts when you’re close or over budget. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to start if you’re unsure.

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Mary Girsch-Bock is the expert on accounting software and payroll software for The Ascent. Janet Berry-Johnson, CPA, is a freelance writer with over a decade of experience working on both the tax and audit sides of an accounting firm. She’s passionate about helping people make sense of complicated tax and accounting topics. Her work has appeared in Business Insider, Forbes, and The New York Times, and on LendingTree, Credit Karma, and Discover, among others. This article offers a full guide to creating invoices for your services. Liam Martin is a co-founder of Time Doctor which is software to improve productivity and help keep track and know what your team is working on, even when working from home.

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It’s used by major companies as well as small-medium businesses like to optimize their business efficiency. Then, take the salary you have in mind and divide it by the number of working hours in a year. You’ll need to do some online research to check if your expected income is on par with similar services.

Time Doctor allows you to allocate shifts to users and helps you to track absenteeism and late attendance. Time Doctor gives you access to seven types of reports https://www.bookstime.com/articles/irs-receipts-requirements that can help you analyze how productive you and your team members are. You can even export these reports as Excel or CSV files and store them for reference.

In this article, we’re going to discuss everything you need to know about billable hours and the tools you need to start optimizing outputs as soon as possible. For example, let’s say client X has asked for a multitude of changes to a project where you spent 15 extra non-billable hours for the month. With the billable tasks lined up for the next day, billing hours you’ll know just how much time you can allocate to non-billable items. Finding a balance between billable and non-billable hours can be tough, especially since non-billable tasks are as essential to running your business as your core tasks. When you complete a project or at the end of each billing cycle, add up all your billable hours for each client.