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    With time reports at your fingertips, you can give your clients detailed accounts of time costs—who is doing what, hour by hour—showing that you don’t waste your time or their money. Your clients will be impressed by your organization and efficiency—something they won’t get from the agency down the street, unless they also have Clients & Profits!

    The old expression, “the squeaky wheel get the oil” applies to clients too. The demanding clients are often the ones whose jobs you’ll jump on to keep them satisfied (and quiet). But what about those silent clients? More often than not, squeaky clients monopolize your people’s time (remember, time = money), pulling them away from more deserving—and more profitable—clients. Track your time and you’ll find out which are valuable keepers and which should be resigned.

    Last, if you’re not tracking hours, jobs could easily get out of hand (especially with picky designers or demanding clients). They’ll careen off budget before you can say “stop!” When you know how many hours—billable or not—go into a job, you’ll always know the labor cost and how closely the job is matching the budget. Remember, for every hour you don’t bill, you’re working for free.

Time for better communication

    In the advertising world, there are two parts to time keeping. The first is tracking the time itself: how it gets applied to different jobs, how it’s monitored and kept on track, and how it gets billed. The second is the universally-dreaded problem of getting staffers to turn in or enter their time.

    Most creatives hate keeping track of their time, and any obstacle is one more reason not to do it. And who wants the job of beating it out of them or rewarding them for doing something they are supposed to do anyway? You have your own work to do! So instead of threats or bribes, Clients & Profits offers you tools that remove the obstacles that make time entry so odious.

    What features would help make planning and monitoring time less difficult for management? Start by letting employees plan and account for every hour of their work day.
”We require that everyday, every employee must account for 8 hours,” says Joe Notovitz, president of Notovitz Communications. “That means lunch is a tracked time, personal time, if someone comes in late, everything.

If they work more than 8 hours, it gets billed to a project.” With every hour accounted for, you’ll be able to see how much time goes into meetings, cleanup, and other miscellaneous tasks that aren’t billable. It’s the first step in finding ways to cut costs on unbillable time and leave more time to do billable work.

    Next, you can set up alerts that keep estimated job tasks within their estimated hours by warning users as they approach time limits for a task. Status code alerts keep all time entries off of jobs that have not yet been approved, are on hold, or are closed.

    “Clients & Profits keeps track of all the costs that go into a job and makes sure that we bill everything,” Joe says. “Everybody in the office is continuously entering time and expenses, updating job tickets with things that have happened so when it comes time to bill the job, not a penny goes uncollected.”

See where the time goes

    Flexible productivity reports allow for clear analysis of billable vs. unbillable time; planned hours vs. actual hours; and billable time by job, task, or staffer. Detailed job reports show, task by task, estimated hours vs. actual hours.

    Easily print meaningful reports sorted many different ways to find out how a job is progressing and if everything that needs to be done is getting done. After working in the database for a period of time, you’ll have historical information accessible that can help in your planning for new jobs that are similar to old jobs.

    “Everyone enters details when they enter time,” Joe says. “At the end of a project, when I print out task cost reports, I can see who did what and how long it took. If I need to, I can go back to the staff and find out why they spent so much time on something, and I can also show it to client in case they question invoice.”

    The reasons to track time can be summed up in one word: success. By tracking staffers’ time, you’ll be able to better manage their work, the jobs, and costs. By letting them enter their own time, they’ll be empowered to think creatively while keeping costs in mind. “My staff knows that there are limitations as far as time and money,” Joe says. “They know they can’t spend what ever they want to on a job” so they find creative solutions quickly.

    Successfully tracking and managing time will benefit your shop, your staff, and your clients. Success all the way around. Isn’t that the way it should be?!