A firm that sells time has one commercial problem above all others: the gap between time worked and time billed.
That gap is rarely one large omission. It is a call not logged, twenty minutes reviewing something, a revision absorbed because it felt small, and a Friday afternoon spent reconstructing a week from calendar entries and memory. Each is minor. Together they routinely account for a substantial share of available revenue.
Firms usually respond by raising rates. It is often easier and more defensible to bill more accurately for the work already being done.
Reconstructed time is understated time
The central operational fact: time recorded from memory is always lower than time worked.
Not occasionally — systematically. People remember the substantial blocks and forget the fragments. A day genuinely containing seven billable hours across many pieces will be reconstructed as five, because the fragments left no trace.
That is not dishonesty. It is how memory works, and it means any firm relying on end-of-week entry is under-billing by a margin nobody can see.
The fix is not discipline. It is reducing the cost of recording to near zero at the moment work happens — a few seconds, from wherever the person already is. If logging time requires opening a system, finding a client, finding a matter and describing the work, it will be deferred, and deferred means reconstructed.
What the record has to hold
Less than most practice-management systems offer:
- Who did the work
- For which client and matter
- How long
- What it was — enough for the client to recognise it
- Whether it is billable, and if not, why
That last field is the one most often absent and most valuable. Non-billable time recorded with a reason is how a firm learns where its capacity is actually going. Non-billable time simply not recorded is invisible, and the firm concludes it is busy without knowing at what.
Scope creep is a records problem first
In services, as in design studios, work gets absorbed because it cannot be evidenced rather than because anyone decided to absorb it.
A client asks for something adjacent to the agreed scope. It is small. Someone does it. Three months later the engagement is over budget and the conversation about why is unwinnable, because there is no record of what was originally agreed and what was added.
Two records make this manageable:
What was agreed, in a form both sides can refer back to.
What was requested afterwards, captured when it is requested — before the work is done, not when the invoice is questioned.
That second record does not need to be confrontational. Acknowledging a request and noting it is additional is normal professional practice, and it is far easier to raise at the moment than months later.
Utilisation, honestly
Utilisation — the share of available time that is billable — is the metric these firms live by, and it is frequently used badly.
Two cautions worth stating:
High utilisation is not automatically good. A firm at very high utilisation has no capacity for business development, training or absorbing a problem, and is one departure from a crisis.
Utilisation targets change recording behaviour. If people are measured on billable hours, recording drifts toward what is rewarded. The number then measures compliance with the target rather than reality.
More useful, viewed together: realisation (what proportion of recorded time is actually invoiced) and collection (what proportion of invoiced value is actually paid). A firm with strong utilisation and weak realisation is working hard and writing much of it off — which is a scope or pricing problem, not an effort problem.
Where fixed fees change the question
Much professional work has moved to fixed fees, and firms sometimes conclude time recording is therefore unnecessary.
The opposite. Under a fixed fee the client does not care about your hours, but you must — because the only way to know whether a fee was profitable, or whether a type of engagement is worth taking, is knowing what it actually cost to deliver.
Firms that stop recording time under fixed fees lose the ability to price the next one. They are quoting from instinct against unmeasured cost.
What we would say honestly
Truffaire has not published case studies in professional services, and we will not imply experience we cannot substantiate.
What is transferable is the structural pattern, which we build for in other contexts: capture has to be a by-product of the work rather than an additional task, or the record will be optimistic. That is the same finding as production traceability and as billing at a busy counter — different sectors, identical failure.
Where we would push back: if a firm's realisation is low because engagements are consistently scoped optimistically, better time recording will document the problem rather than fix it. The record tells you which it is, which is worth having before deciding what to change.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need practice management software or is a general system enough?
If your work is genuinely matter-based with trust accounting or regulatory obligations, specialist tooling may encode them. If the need is time capture, project profitability and invoicing, a configured general system frequently fits better — the three-way choice in off-the-shelf or custom.
How granular should time entries be?
Granular enough to be recognisable to a client, coarse enough to be recorded without friction. Excessive granularity increases the cost of recording and therefore reduces it.
Should we bill for small tasks?
Whether you bill is a commercial decision. Whether you record is not — recording it makes the decision visible rather than automatic, and unrecorded small tasks are the largest share of the gap.
How do we handle work that overruns?
Raise it when it becomes apparent, with the record of what was agreed and what changed. Firms that raise it at invoicing are having a harder conversation with weaker evidence.
What about tracking time automatically?
Automatic capture from calendars and documents helps as a prompt. It still needs a person to confirm what was billable, because software cannot distinguish focused work from a document left open.
Where to start
For two weeks, ask everyone to record time as it happens rather than at week end — including non-billable, with reasons.
Compare the total to a typical week's recorded hours. The difference is what reconstruction was costing you, and it is usually larger than expected.
Then look at where non-billable time went. That is usually the more interesting finding, and neither requires buying anything to discover.
If you want a read on whether your gap is recording, scoping or pricing, get in touch.