If you want to know how profitable a client is, how good your pricing is, whether you’re under or over-servicing, whether your rate card is working for you, then timesheeting is the way forward. Without that, all you know is how much you charge a client, with no reliable way of checking what value you’re delivering other than gut feel.

Most small agencies know this, and (sort of) do timesheets. Often some of the team do some of their timesheets, some of the time; there might be a reminder sent around every now and then but generally the owners feel bad pushing people to do them, and if the reason for doing them isn’t explained properly in the first place then the team misinterpret it as being “watched” and checked up on. And more often than not in small agencies, guess who doesn’t do them? The owners. i.e. the most expensive people in the business. So the value delivered to clients by those people is missed out of the maths.

You’ll rarely run a time report based on a person, you’ll run the reports based on the client (or better still project), and if you take the time to show the team why you run them and what the output is, then people are more likely to do it consistently.

The truth is, there is no point (NO point) in 75% of your team doing timesheets. It tells you nothing. Every project will appear to be under-serviced, and every time you look at a report on a client you’ll find yourself saying “yeah, but remember it’s wrong because Tom doesn’t do his timesheets” or ” and “yeah but remember Amy always puts her time on the wrong project”, in which case it’s a worthless exercise.

So: do them completely or don’t do them at all.

Actually.. just do them.