If you can't say how many hours a project has taken, you can't say whether the fee was enough. Most small practices know this, and still end up reconstructing the week on a Friday afternoon. This guide is a simple way to track time that people will actually keep up.
Why track time at all
- To see whether each project is making money, not just whether it is busy.
- To price the next similar project from real hours, not guesses.
- To back up a variation. "This took 20 more hours than the brief" is easier to say with a record.
- To invoice time-based work accurately.
Step 1: log against the project, not the day
Ask everyone to record hours against a project (and a stage, if you track stages), not as a general "worked on drawings" total. It takes the same effort and gives you something you can use.
Step 2: log little and often
A timesheet filled in at the end of each day is far more accurate than one filled in on Friday. Even one reminder at the end of the day helps. If a week is missing, someone is reconstructing it from memory.
Step 3: use the same stages as your fee
If you priced the fee by RIBA stage, record time against the same stages. Then at the end of a stage you can compare the hours planned with the hours used, and see where the project is running over while there is still time to act.
Step 4: approve weekly
Someone senior should look at the week's timesheets and approve them in one go. This catches the obvious errors (a project missing, 40 hours on the wrong job) while people can still remember.
Step 5: look at the totals every month
Once a month, compare hours used against the fee for each live project. The number that matters is your effective hourly rate: the fee received so far divided by the hours spent. If it is falling below your target, you want to know now, not at the end.
The common mistake
Treating time tracking as something to police. If it feels like surveillance, people fill it in badly or late. Explain what it is for: pricing, protecting the fee and planning the team's workload.
How Projexa helps
In Projexa each person fills in a weekly timesheet against projects, and you approve the lot in one go. The hours flow into the project, where you see them next to the fee budget and your effective hourly rate, and into invoices for time-based work.