Study Shows Untracked Emails, Meetings, Mean Big Loss In Revenue

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

A new AffinityLive study finds that emails, meetings, and poor timesheet habits result in a loss of 38 percent of billable time annually, the same as if businesses shut down two days a week.

Many individuals working in professional services are required to log the amount of time they spent working on specific projects (or billable hours) for a diverse set of clients and record this time manually, often several days after their work has been completed.

To help evaluate the impact of manual time tracking, AffinityLive surveyed more than 500 IT, digital and creative, engineering, legal, accounting, and public relations professionals and found that the top reason professionals have poor time tracking habits is simply because it’s cumbersome to do.

The study concluded that the average professional services employee costs firms up to $110,000 annually by not properly tracking time spent in meetings, on emails and by filling in timesheets only once a week.

The study discovered that more than half (51 percent) of respondents rarely or never track time spent reading and answering emails, and 28 percent said the same for meetings. Amounting to 736 hours a year, or almost two full days of billable time per week, this costs the average professional services business more than $110,000 per year in lost revenue.

“Whether they bill on an hourly or retainer basis, professional services firms make money based entirely on time spent completing projects,” said Geoff McQueen, CEO of AffinityLive. “If services employees are failing to record almost 40 percent of their work, the resulting revenue loss is colossal. This is similar to a business keeping its doors closed until half way through May every year, while continuing to pay salaries, rent and all of their other expenses the whole time.”

“Firms that are not accurately keeping track of emails, calls, and meetings are literally throwing money out the window,” McQueen said. “This has an even bigger impact on professional services firms, as the primary method of service for this industry today is through emails, calls and meetings with clients and colleagues to successfully deliver their professional service.”

In addition, more frequent tracking of time by professionals proves to be more accurate reporting, the study found.  Forty-nine percent of respondents reported that they fill in timesheets on a daily basis, while over a third (36 percent) stated that they do it weekly or even less frequently.  Those who did not engage in the daily routine were half as likely to be accurate in their reporting.

According to the report, the three major costs of the current, manual timesheet practices are:

• Email causes professionals to leak over $50,000 in revenue per year
• Meetings and calls cause professionals to leak over $32,000 in revenue per year
• Moving from weekly (or worse) timesheet updates to daily (or better) would recover $52,000 per professional, per year in billable time.

The AffinityLive survey also discovered that professional services employees generally have poor time-tracking habits, with only 17 percent keeping track of the time they spend on email, 22 percent tracking time engaged in phone calls, and 44 percent tracking meeting time. 

The full report is available for download at www.affinitylive.com/resources/white-papers/time-leakage.