Billable hours are the consultant hours for which the client can be invoiced. In time and material projects, each hour is billed with the specific rate of the specialist. In fixed price projects, any specialist hours toward the project can be considered billable, while the final hourly rate will be calculated from the project cost divided by the number of billable hours.
Precise measurement of working hours should be done with time-tracking software. In well-organized companies, even the CEO tracks time. Correct time tracking without big delays could be part of the quarterly employee evaluation practice. Personal scheduling and time tracking with a dedicated software program usually positively affects productivity.
Billable hours give you answers to the following important questions:
- How does actual time match the planned time on a project?
- How should we estimate a new similar project?
- How many hours did we spend on this project?
- Which projects received more contribution?
- How does the logged time match assignments?
In Metric.ai, there are options to configure hours calculation:
Besides the time period you are able to choose which employees to use to calculate the time:
- All employees
- Billable employees
- Internal (non-billable) employees
And you can choose whether to include or exclude time off (defines as a project with billing type internal and Time-off option chosen).
You can see multiple types of hours in the billable hours view:
Logged hours are those which are reflected in timesheets (inputted in Metric.ai or via time tracking software).
Capacity hours come from selected employees’ availability (defined by Employment type section in Cost Rate employee tab).
Planned hours are calculated from Allocations (could be imported from a resource scheduling tool like Float via integration or internal resource allocation functionality in Metric.ai).
Forecasted hours consist of logged time before today and planned hours after today.
To learn more about the analytics view of Metric.ai, please read Analytics overview help documentation.