What It Is Actually Worth

Time tracking is sold on recovered billable hours and reduced leakage. Both claims are weaker than they look and both are checkable.

The claim that does not hold

"Captures N percent more billable time."

It assumes the unrecorded time was billable, that the client would have paid for it, and that recording it converts to revenue rather than to a write-off.

In practice much recovered time is written off at review, because the client agreed a fee or the work was not chargeable.

Ask for the realisation figure, not the recorded figure. The gap between them is where this claim goes.

What does hold up

Realisation, measured. Recorded hours against billed hours against collected. Three numbers, all available, and the gaps are where the money is.

Leakage found at the point of recording. Time recorded a week later is more likely to be rounded away or forgotten; recording sooner recovers some of it, and the recovery is measurable before and after.

Estimate calibration. Knowing that a class of project takes forty percent longer than quoted is worth more than any recovered hour, and it comes free once actuals exist.

Project costing. Understanding which work loses money is a decision-changing finding and it requires effort data covering all work, not just billable.

Compliance. Where recording daily working time is a legal obligation, the case is regulatory rather than financial and should be made on those terms.

The costs that appear later

The time spent recording time. A few minutes a day across everyone is a real recurring cost and it appears in no proposal. Compute it: minutes per person per day, times people, times working days.

Administration: chasing, correcting, approving.

Integration with payroll and billing, which is where the effort actually goes.

Data quality work, which is ongoing.

The trust cost, if monitoring is bundled in, which is not a line item and is the largest of them.

Sizing it honestly

Measure your current realisation before deployment. Without a baseline no improvement can be demonstrated.

Measure recording delay: what proportion of entries are made within a day.

Pick one project and reconstruct its true cost including unbilled effort, by hand. The number is usually startling and it is the best argument available.

Estimate the recovery conservatively and state the assumption so the assumption gets challenged rather than the conclusion.

What to commit to

Not a percentage increase in billable hours.

A specific change in a specific measure, with a date and the same method afterwards.

"Proportion of time entries made within one working day from thirty to eighty percent within two quarters."

Or, for the compliance case: a record of daily start, end and breaks for every worker, accessible to them, retained for the statutory period.

Checkable, which is what makes it fundable a second time.

The cost of recording

A recurring cost that appears in no proposal and is straightforward to compute.

Minutes per person per day, measured rather than assumed.

Times people, times working days, times cost.

Annualised.

For a large organisation this frequently exceeds the licence, and it continues forever.

It is also the number that justifies removing friction: cutting daily recording from six minutes to two returns more than most efficiency projects, and it improves accuracy at the same time.

Measuring the baseline first

Without it no improvement can be demonstrated and every later claim is an assertion.

Current realisation: recorded, billed, collected.

Current recording delay.

Current unbilled effort as a proportion, to the extent it is recorded at all.

Current time spent recording.

Take these before the system changes, which means before procurement rather than after go-live.

Most organisations skip this and then cannot say whether anything improved, which is why the second phase is hard to fund.

Connect policy to configuration

The practical choices behind this note can be compared with workforce optimisation platform. Keep the organisation's written purpose in control of the setup, enable only the data needed for that purpose and review the result with affected users.