Time is money in professional services. Ultimately, it all comes down to whether employees are regularly and accurately logging their time, which has a flow-on effect on your project and company reporting. Without accurate time entry, you won’t know whether your company is viable.

However, employees are often resistant to time entry, or struggle to regularly submit their timesheets by the given deadline. Here, we’ll discuss the importance of timesheets, the common issues facing time entry in the global consulting industry, and how to eliminate the problem of late timesheets once and for all.

Why are timesheets important?

Time tracking is crucial to professional services, and has numerous benefits for employees, clients, and the business itself.

Accurately bill clients

Reliable and regular time entries allow you to create invoices that are accurate to the hours worked. This means that you can provide accurate, itemized invoices to your client on a regular basis, and ensure steady cashflow across the lifecycle of the project. Up-to-date time entries also ensure that you don’t run into any internal payroll issues.

Monitor project performance

By using time entries to calculate hours worked, you can track project cost against the project budget, and make sure that you’re on track for success.

Ensure project profitability

By combining employee cost, billable rate, and hours worked (for time & materials projects), you can understand margin by person and overall margin by project and company. This helps you to identify staff and projects that may need more support or intervention.

Track employee utilization

By comparing the hours an employee has worked on a billable project against their capacity, you can gain insights into how well-utilized each employee is at your company, which in turn will allow you to optimize staffing on current and future projects.

Know when to make hiring decisions

The employee utilization data you can derive from time entries lets you plan successful projects through knowing who is available, at capacity, or over-allocated at a glance.

There are many ways to make timesheets easier to regularly complete, including using a tool like Projectworks that offers digital time entry and a start/stop timer. Simple approval processes will also save you time. However, despite these helpful features, timesheets remain problematic for many business owners, with employees forgetting or avoiding time entry on a regular basis. Even one missing timesheet can throw a spanner in the works for your professional services business.

How often are timesheets late?

Despite timesheets being crucial to the efficient operation and profitability of professional services businesses, it’s very common for timesheets to be submitted late.

According to our recent 2024 Consulting Industry Benchmarking Report, which surveyed professional services staff in the global architecture, engineering, management consulting, and software services industries:

• 22.3% of time entries are submitted after the week they are due.
• If a timesheet is submitted post week-end, it takes an average of 3 days for it to be submitted.
• If a timesheet is submitted post month-end, it takes an average of 7 days for it to be submitted.
• 24.1% of survey respondents feel their timesheets aren’t entered in a timely and accurate manner.
• 6% of time entries are submitted after both week- and month-ends.

Late timesheets are a widespread issue in the professional services field, and negatively affect your profitability. Delayed timesheets prevent you from invoicing your clients on time, limiting your cashflow and having run-on effects on business operations. If time isn’t accurately logged, you can’t make judgments about utilization, productivity, or project performance.

But how do you remind employees to submit timesheets on time?

A solution for late timesheets: timesheet reminders

As a platform designed for the professional services industry, we want to make running your business easy, so you can focus on what you do best. In response to these timesheet trends we’ve seen in the industry, we’ve created a new feature in Projectworks: timesheet reminders.

What are timesheet reminders?

A timesheet reminder is a great tool to remind members of your team to fill out and submit their timesheet for the week. In Projectworks, you have the option to turn on timesheet reminders, which will identify active employees with a billable posting AND who have not yet submitted their timesheet.

You can then establish a schedule (for example, a Friday timesheet reminder) that will send these employees a timesheet reminder email with a link to the current week’s timesheet. A common configuration is to set reminders slightly before and after the deadline for timesheet submission - this way your users are not getting too many emails, but those who have been busy still have a timely reminder to get their timesheets sorted!

These automated reminders make it easy for employees to stay on top of their admin, and save your project managers from chasing employees for their timesheets. If you run multiple organizations, you can configure different uses for timesheet reminders based on the needs of each individual organization.

You can learn how to turn on these timesheet reminders in Projectworks here.

Have your say: How can we improve timesheet reminders?

Timesheet reminders in Projectworks are currently in beta, and we’d love to hear your suggestions for how to improve on them further. Whatever your thoughts, we look forward to hearing them at support@projectworks.io.

Summary

Late timesheets are a tricky issue in the world of professional services. However, you can minimize their impact with tools like digital time entry, start/stop timers, simple approval processes, and timesheet reminders.

If you’re not already using Projectworks, why not get started today? Our free trial lets you use all of Projectworks' features for 21 days, no strings attached. Learn how you can grow your business and join hundreds of professional services businesses scaling for success.

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