● Insights from everyday consulting
Tracking time is easy. Billing it right is art.
Quarter-hour rounding, billable or not, fixed price or time and material, plan versus actuals: between a recorded hour and a clean customer invoice lies a lot of manual work today. Here is why exactly that work can disappear when time tracking lives where your planning already lives.
The problem
The hour is recorded. The real work starts afterwards.
For consultants, time tracking should take seconds: pick the project, enter the hours, done. Consultants want to record their time and get back to work. They do not want billing logic in their heads.
In practice, however, every recorded hour drags a long tail of questions behind it: Is this billable? Does it belong to the fixed-price package? Does it need to be rounded to quarter hours? And does it even match what was planned? A normal time tracking tool answers none of these questions. It stores the hour and leaves the rest to the consultant, the project manager or controlling.
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The difference
Time tracking tells you how long. Effort recording tells you what it is worth.
The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they mean different things. And the added value lives exactly in that difference.
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Time tracking
Documents when and how long someone worked. Important for working-time accounts and compliance. This is the layer the consultant maintains: pick the project, enter the hours, done. |
Effort recording
Documents what was worked on and under which conditions: which project, which activity, billable or not, fixed price or time and material, rounded according to the contract. This is the layer that invoices, margins and reports are built from. |
The mistake most systems make: they dump both layers on the consultant, who is expected to know at every entry what the contract says, how rounding works and what falls into the fixed-price package. The better answer: the consultant maintains only the time layer. The system derives the effort layer automatically, because it already knows the project, the assignment and the contract conditions.
The principle
Consultants record time. The system turns it into billable effort.
Everything that is rule-based belongs in the configuration, not in the consultant’s head. Defined once per project or contract, it applies to everyone in the same way. The path from a recorded hour to a customer invoice then looks like this:
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Record timePick the project, enter the hours, done. No billing knowledge, no rulebook in your head. Your own assignments are already there, because they come from the planning. |
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Apply rules automaticallyQuarter-hour rounding, billable classification, fixed-price or time-and-material logic, rates per role and customer: the system applies the stored contract rules, consistently and traceably. |
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Invoice cleanlyApproved hours turn into a timesheet the customer can follow and into billing data that matches the invoice. No discussions, no rework in controlling. |
The home advantage
Why time tracking belongs in resource management
decídalo is the platform consulting firms use to manage their consultants: skills and profiles, projects, assignment planning and utilization. Projects, assignments and planned hours already exist there. That changes time tracking fundamentally, because it does not start on a greenfield. It starts right in the middle of the data it needs.
The assignments are already thereConsultants do not search for projects in endless lists. Their planned assignments from resource planning are the booking targets. Anything unplanned stands out immediately. |
Plan versus actuals without ExcelPlanned hours automatically meet recorded actuals, per project, person and week. Deviations become visible while you can still react, not at the end of the month. |
Real utilization instead of a planning snapshotUtilization management and forecasting calculate with what was actually delivered, not just with what was once planned. That makes staffing decisions reliable. |
On top of that, framework agreements can be attached directly to the project in decídalo. Conditions such as rates, rounding and billing rules are anchored exactly where the hours are recorded, and no longer need to be looked up for every entry or every invoice.
Reporting benefits as well: missing hours per team, open approvals, project budget consumption and the share of billable hours can be evaluated directly, without merging data from several systems.
What changes
Less busywork, more billable time
The added value over a normal time tracking tool does not lie in the recording itself. It lies in everything that no longer has to happen afterwards: no manual rounding, no puzzling over billable versus non-billable, no reconstructing fixed-price shares, no Excel for the plan-versus-actuals comparison, no invoice corrections after customer queries.
Consultants win back time for the work customers actually book them for. Project managers see early where a project deviates from the plan. And at the end of the month, the company sends out an invoice that is right the first time.
Frequently asked questions
Time and effort tracking in consulting
What is the difference between time tracking and effort recording?
Time tracking documents when and how long someone worked, often for labor-law reasons. Effort recording documents what was worked on and under which conditions: which project, which activity, billable or not, fixed price or time and material. In consulting you need both, ideally from a single entry where the consultant only maintains the time layer.
How does the system decide what is billable?
Through the configuration of project and contract: it defines which activities are billable, whether billing is fixed price or time and material, how hours are rounded and which rates apply. These rules are applied automatically and identically to every recorded hour, instead of being decided anew with every entry.
Why does time tracking belong in resource management?
Because everything time tracking needs already lives there: projects, assignments, planned hours and availability. Consultants book against their planned assignments, the plan-versus-actuals comparison happens automatically, and utilization management calculates with real instead of planned values. A separate time tracking tool would first need all of this data mirrored into it.
What does the plan-versus-actuals comparison deliver in practice?
It continuously shows how recorded actuals deviate from the plan, per project, person and period. Project managers notice early when a budget is burning too fast or planned capacity stays unused, and can react before the margin suffers or the customer finds a surprise on the invoice.
How much manual work sits between your hours and your invoice?
Let us walk through where your process loses time and revenue between time tracking and customer billing.