Billable Hours Guide: Tracking Tips to Increase Profits by 20%

how to calculate billable hours

Therefore, all firms have to take into account several factors such as downtime, vacation time, sustainability, and other factors when deciding on billable time. In this tutorial, I am going to show you 4 effective ways to calculate billable hours in excel. You can use these methods even in large datasets to find out the billable hours and total fees for different clients. Throughout this tutorial, you will also learn some important excel tools and techniques which will be very useful in any excel related task.

  • Enter the total number of hours worked on a project and the hourly rate charged for those hours to calculate the total billable value.
  • Automate the process of calculation and find out the exact billing amount in an instant.
  • If you know the hourly costs of your business, you can for sure estimate your hourly rates; this meansyou can calculate your profitability.
  • You can track and record all the hours spent on the project and then separate billable and non-billable hours or you can simply record billable hours and leave out non-billable hours.

Paid vacation days and other benefits of in-house employees, etc. Attending any meetings with people who aren’t yet contracted clients. Attending meetings with the client or related to the client’s project. For workers like consultants, freelancers, https://www.bookstime.com/ and contractors, a full day’s work, hopefully, looks a little different. Project member rate, used when time is tracked for a particular project by a particular user . Project rate, used when the time is tracked for a particular project .

How to Track Time with a Billable Hours Chart

This includes everything from process to hierarchy, which determine project success, client satisfaction, workplace culture, and more. In the example of this article, the working time are calculated as hours, it will convert minutes to hours automatically, such as 2.3 hours, 5.5 hours.

Or remove the date entirely if your organization does not have that as a paid holiday. Please remember to adjust any 2021 references to the current year when using the tool.

Non-billable-hour tasks

Instead of spending time collecting timesheets, you can focus on acting upon what the numbers are telling you. The realities of constant context switching might mean that achieving 60% utilization is hard for the latter while maintaining 100% utilization is no big deal for the former. Firms should consciously and deliberately decide which assumptions and approaches to use and understand what behaviors those decisions are likely to drive. Everyone who is responsible for measuring and optimizing resource billable hours utilization rates needs to understand the assumptions and ensure that the approaches are used consistently with their intent. Also, companies may take a slightly more nuanced, but still straightforward measure for individual team members in the form of bonus calculations or metrics on individual dashboards. This measure is often utilization-based on productive hours divided by working hours minus holidays and time off. This can then be compared to a minimum productive utilization target.

  • Next, you’ll need to create a time log to track your billable hours by client.
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  • Getting on a 30-minute call about a potential project or doing a pitch to a potential client.
  • Or maybe you know that work typically slows down around the holidays.