One of the common challenges for professional services firms or other companies that sell their time and expertise is revenue leakage caused by inaccurate time sheets.
Tracking Time Manually Costs Companies Money in Several Ways
When professionals have to reconstruct their billable time at the end of a period, they can waste one to two unbillable hours trying to reconcile their calendars, emails, phone logs and computer activity to retroactively understand what they did, when, and for whom. Inevitably, they will miss billable conversations, meetings or activities.
And if a professional with a rate of $200 per hour misses just an hour a week of billable time, a firm can lose $10,000 in revenue annually.
For busy professionals, it’s unrealistic and potentially unprofitable to capture every minute of time or every activity manually. Time that’s spent tracking time is, ironically, time that’s taken away from serving clients or developing new business.
For finance departments, and project managers, having only weekly, biweekly or late access to timesheet data can delay the period close while hindering management’s ability to oversee a project’s scheduling, profitability and resource allocation effectively.
Additional problems include relying on home-brewed or third-party time-tracking solutions that, themselves, require extra reconciliations and cause out-of-sync issues with their data sources.
Sage Intacct’s Solution for Billable Time Tracking
Sage Intacct’s AI-powered Intelligent Time assistant relieves professionals from the time-consuming and frustrating tasks of reconciling timesheets by gathering activity from calendars, email and collaboration tools, productivity suites, and browser activity to present a draft timesheet that displays everything a professional did during a week, how long it took, and which the client should be billed.
The professional can review this draft on their mobile device or the web to quickly revise and submit a timesheet in a fraction of the time required by manual time-tracking tasks.
For professionals, saving the time needed to prepare a manual timesheet frees up additional time for more profitable activities, while reducing the frustration associated with dreaded administrative chores.
For finance professionals, the Intelligent Time solution helps firms:
- Recover billable time that would otherwise be lost
- Increase cash flow by enabling faster billing cycles and more accurate invoices
- Speed the close of financial periods by reducing accruals or late billing
- Improve project costing and profitability by providing more accurate insights into project costs and decisions about project scope changes
- Develop more accurate profit projections through better understanding of past patterns
- Enhance project staffing and enjoy higher utilization rates
To learn more about how Sage Intacct’s AI-powered Intelligent Time assistant can help your firm reduce revenue leakage and recover lost hours, contact us to schedule a demo. In the meantime, visit our Sage Intacct service page and other related blog articles to learn more.
