Guide
Billable utilisation
Billable utilisation is the share of available hours spent on chargeable work. How to calculate it, and what to leave out of the denominator.
Billable utilisation is billable hours divided by the hours a person was available to work in the same period. A consultant available for 38 hours who booked 30 chargeable hours is at about 79%.
The figure is only as honest as its denominator. Leave and public holidays are usually taken out of available hours, because nobody can bill a day they were not working. Training and internal work are a policy choice: some firms count them as available time, others do not.
It is a measure of how a firm’s time is spent, not of how hard anybody works, and ranking people by it tends to produce worse records rather than more billable work.
In ReliTime
ReliTime records why each non-billable hour was not chargeable, and each category says whether it counts against available hours, so the organisation decides the denominator once.
Related
Questions people ask
What is a good billable utilisation rate?
It depends on the role. Somebody who also manages people or wins work will be lower than somebody who only delivers. Compare a role with itself over time rather than people with each other.
Should leave count in the calculation?
Usually not. Taking leave and public holidays out of available hours stops a week off looking like a week of low utilisation.
See it on your own kind of work
We set ReliTime up with a walkthrough rather than a sign-up form. We will take you through a working organisation, from a week of timesheets through approvals and work in progress to a GST invoice, answer your questions as we go, and set up yours.
Or write to hello@relitime.com.