By Judy Hector

    Just mention “time cards” to creatives and you’ll get one of two reactions: they’ll either slip into a coma or pepper you with reasons why they can’t manage to track the time they spend working on jobs. You’ll hear things like “time cards derail my creativity,” “time cards are boring,” “I’m not the only one!” and “um... I forgot.”

    As a manager, you know how critical it is to track time. After all, as a service company, time is pretty much all you have. And you’ve tried everything to get staffers to track time, from bribery to threats, but nothing works. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an occasional time card, but incomplete at best.

    You know you’re working as hard as you can, but once you start tracking time, you’ll know if you’re working as smart as you can. Tracking time—all of your time—and evaluating the results will give you a bottom-line, dollars-and-cents measurement of how profitable your time really is. Whether you bill by the hour or not, knowing how you spend your time is financially prudent.

Time = Money

    Even if you don’t bill by the hour, time does, indeed, still equal money. Without an accurate record of how many hours it really takes complete jobs, you’re either shortchanging your shop-—or your clients.

    First of all, if you’re not sure how long a job takes, you can only use your best guess when scheduling the next similar one. If you run up too close to a deadline, you’re either paying your staff overtime, discounting the job, or disappointing a client. If you overshoot your schedule, you’ll have people (still getting paid) sitting around with no billable work to do. No matter how you look at it, neither of those are very good options.

    Second, if you don’t know how many hours to bill, you never know if you’re billing the right amount. You could be overbilling the client or gypping yourself. Either way, without time cards, there’s no paper trail to prove your worth in the (hopefully unlikely) event of a fees dispute.

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