Employee Monitoring Glossary
Billable Hours
Time spent on work directly chargeable to a client. Every unrecorded billable minute is revenue lost.
Definition
Billable hours are time spent on work that is directly chargeable to a client or customer. In professional services firms — agencies, consulting, law, accounting — billable hour tracking is the primary revenue mechanism. Firms charge clients based on hours worked, so any unrecorded billable time is lost revenue. Research consistently shows that manual timesheet reconstruction misses 20-30% of actual billable time, because employees forget short tasks, context switches, and multiple client sessions from earlier in the week.
Billable vs Non-Billable Hours
- Billable — client project work, client calls, client deliverables, research for a specific client
- Non-billable (internal) — internal meetings, business development, admin, training, team management
- Billable ratio — the percentage of total work time that is billable to clients; a healthy professional services firm targets 70-80%+ billable ratio
Tracking Billable Hours Automatically
TheDeskMonitor tracks billable hours automatically per project or client — the desktop agent logs which applications and websites were used for each project, and the project time tracking feature aggregates billable hours per client for invoice generation. Agencies using automatic billable hour tracking typically recover 15-25% more revenue than teams using manual timesheets.