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Time tracking & profitability

Everything you need to start logging time and reading the profitability and labour insights. Two parts: everyone (logging) and partners(setup & insights).

For everyone: logging your time

Open the Time tab in the top nav. There are two ways to log:

The weekly grid.Rows are your client/engagement work, columns are the days (Mon–Sun, today highlighted). Click a cell, type the hours, click away — it saves automatically. Empty a cell to remove that day's time. Use + Add a client / engagement row…to add a row; only active or paused work shows in the picker. Prev / This week / Next move between weeks, and row, day, and week totals update live.

The timer. Pick an engagement in the timer bar and hit Start — it counts up. Hit Stopand the elapsed time lands on today's cell for that engagement. The timer survives a refresh, so you can leave it running.

Billable vs internal. Time on a normal client engagement is billable. Time on an Internalengagement (Admin, Internal Meetings, OOO, BD, etc.) is logged non-billable automatically and kept out of profitability — so internal time never drags down recovery or margin. It's based on how the engagement is set up; you don't do anything.

That's the whole job for non-partners: log against the right client/engagement, every day. Everything below is built from that.

For partners: one-time setup

Three things make the dollar figures appear. All live in Settings and are partner-only.

  • Rate card (Settings → Rate card). Enter a billable rate and cost rate for each tier (Partner / Manager / Senior / Staff). Billable drives the value of logged time; cost drives margin.
  • Rate tiers(Settings → Team). Each person has a rate-tier dropdown — set it to their tier. Every hour they log then snapshots that tier's rates; historical entries keep the rate they were logged at, so changing a tier later doesn't rewrite the past.
  • Labour targets (Settings → Firm settings). Set target $/hr, breakeven $/hr, and utilization target %. These drive the flags in the Labour analysis — clients below breakeven show red, below target gold.

Retainers (agency). On a Clients engagement, set Kind = Retainer and a monthly hours allotment. The engagement snapshot then shows retainer burn— this month's hours vs the allotment.

Reading the insights (partners & senior managers)

Per engagement (Clients tab).Open any engagement — the snapshot shows logged hours and, for partners/finance, Time value / Time cost / Margin, plus retainer burn for retainers. Internal engagements show "excluded from recovery" instead of dollars.

Firm tab.Time analytics rolls up the last 90 days: hours and billable % by person, plus firm value/cost/margin. The Service-line library shows, per service line, the average hours / fee / effective rate / margin from real logged jobs — your reality check when pricing new work.

Labour analysis (Time → Labour analysis sub-tab, partner/senior-manager only) — a live, monthly version of the labour report:

  • KPIs — total / client / internal hours, active clients.
  • Projected to month-end — scales an in-progress month to a projection at current pace.
  • Signals — auto-flags: clients below breakeven/target, revenue concentration ≥ 25%, people under the utilization target, high internal-time %.
  • Utilization by person vs the target.
  • Client profitability — hours, monthly revenue, effective $/hr, status.
  • Hours by service line and a per-person breakdown.
  • Export CSV — download the month for a deck or the Monday review.

Senior managers see hours, utilization, and service-line data, but not the dollar columns — economics are partner/finance-only.

Pricing a proposal. From a pursuit, click Price this → (or open /pricing). Add a role row per tier, enter expected hours, and it returns fee / cost / margin / blended rate from the rate card. An optional proposed-fee field shows realization and margin at that price, and you can save the fee back to the pursuit. Cross-reference the Service-line library to sanity-check the hours.

The short version

  • Everyone: log time daily on the Time tab (grid or timer).
  • Partners, once: rate card → tiers → labour targets (and retainers for agency clients).
  • Then it all lights up: per-engagement margin, firm analytics, the Labour analysis tab, and pricing grounded in real actuals.
Related: Clients & engagements · Firm cockpit · Pursuits & proposals (coming soon)