When I worked for consulting firms before I was self-employed, there were benchmarks consultants had to meet for billable hours per year, and often some metrics for non-working time as well. As an independent consultant, I haven’t really set targets for myself in the same way.
Last fiscal year, I booked all of my time, accounting for every hour in a standard work week (or more than standard if I had more billable time than the standard in a given week). In previous years, I often only tracked billable hours or CPD (continuing professional development) hours (for CPA reporting). My timesheets are for billing, not for payroll, so there was no need for accounting for a set number of hours, except for my own analysis.
My fiscal year ends on Monday (June 30th), and I’m at the point where I have reviewed last year as well as working on planning for my next fiscal year. I already knew what I’d be doing on Monday, so I booked that time in Harvest ahead of time and finished my analysis over the weekend. It was my worst year on record for utilization and billable hours, by a lot. Ugh. Next year’s target is higher than this year's, even though I missed last year's target by a mile. I expect to have fewer distractions this year than last year, and have a few more “irons in the fire” in terms of potential work to fill the gaps I had this year.
My approach
I created targets for my time in various buckets to track billable time vs. administrative activities vs. non-working time. I broke out non-working time into 4 different categories with a “budget” (target number of hours), but made the mistake of having some ill-defined categories where my time could go in more than one bucket, so it was a bit of a “garbage in, garbage out” situation in the end. I altered the categories for next year and re-allocated some of my time to where they should have been so it will be somewhat more consistent with this coming year for a comparison year over year.
My time buckets (other than billable time) are now: administration, time off, family time, self-improvement time, and idle time, aka “on the bench”. For those of you not from a consulting background, if you don’t have work to do in a given day, you were often referred to as being “on the bench”, as in “put me in, coach, I’m ready to play!”.
Last year, I originally had sick time in with family time (I had called it “family and personal” but some things I had booked as personal time were just days off). I also had split Admin out into business development vs. everything else, which seemed like a distinction I didn't need to isolate for tracking.
The biggest challenge I had was my inconsistent human behaviour: it was too easy to manipulate where I booked the time based on how I felt that day. For example, if I felt bad about booking idle time to “on the bench”, I often would convince myself “I took the rest of the day off” and book it as time off. It was easy to blur those lines. I have an idea on how to approach that differently next year. Bench time should be an indication of lost revenue, ultimately, which is different than a conscious decision to take time off from work.
How I tracked it
I have a PowerBI report emailed to me daily where I pull my data from Harvest APIs to monitor several pieces of information, one of which is hours vs. these targets. I’m also using it to track outstanding invoices (how many and their amounts), utilization rate, year-to-date billable hours vs. total hours booked, billings by month compared to the previous fiscal year, and active client projects' hours vs. estimates. I review it every evening, and it works nicely to keep me aware of where I'm at throughout the year.
Here is a screenshot of my daily report, with the details blurred for confidentiality.
Planning for the next fiscal year
I’ve set targets for the same general buckets noted above, covering the 261 weekdays that make up my next fiscal year.
- Billable hours: I had a target number of days in my head, but to confirm whether it was realistic or not, I took a look at how much I've billed my various clients over the past year or two. Based on how much I'm aware of their plans and projects for this year, and the trends recently, I created a low, high and budget estimate for each active and potential client on where I think I’ll end up which helped me see where I’m trending vs. the number in my head I started with.
- Time off: There are 10 statutory holidays in Ontario where I live, plus a vacation day allotment that would be equivalent to what I might have if I were employed elsewhere, and then a small buffer for sick or other time off scenarios that are not “fun”. I’m not going to differentiate why it’s time off, just that it is different from “on the bench”.
- Family time: If I did not have power of attorney duties to fulfill, I would not even have this isolated in its own category, but it took up a lot of my time last year. I set a target based on how often I plan on visiting, as each visit takes up most of a day, with it being close to 2 hours each way in travel time, plus the visit and any other business I have to attend to while I’m there.
- Learning time: I’ve set a target for time spent on self-improvement, whether it be at conferences or learning in other forms. I’m often learning on my own time, but if I have time to do some of this during business hours, that time will be booked here.
- Administration: I’ve set aside some hours per month for the regular activities surrounding a business,s plus a bit extra this year for some specific system and process improvements I started making last year. I know I have the time available, so I may as well use it and track against it.
- Idle time is "on the bench", and there is no target, as I expect that it is zero hours. When work is slow, I should be scheduling my time to focus on admin and learning if I'm not otherwise off for vacation or family time.
Changes in approach
As far as changing my tracking approach, I will be more deliberate in planning time off this year than I was last year. What I hope to do - as much as my imperfect human behaviour will allow (LOL) - is regularly review my schedule and workload, schedule my time off where it fits, and if I end up with idle time that wasn’t planned for, it will get charged to “the bench”. That’s my theory anyway! 😄
Some areas I’m not going to track are where the time flows into my personal time. I will track CPD hours for my CPA designation separately since it is often a mix of business and personal time that it’s done on. I am only trying to account for my standard work week now, not all other kinds of non-billable time that I need or want to track. If CPD occurs during business hours, it would just get booked to "learning" like any other learning, but I won't capture all of it this way.
Business vs. Personal time
Ultimately, some of the time buckets are only there to book my time against when I have time during business hours to use for them. When client work is busier, many of those activities move to evenings and weekends and thus don’t get tracked anymore: visits to my relative shift to a weekend, bookkeeping gets done after hours, learning is done on my own time, etc.
I don't want to be 100% billable, that's not my goal. If I approach that level of busy-ness, then things I still need to do for my business inherently will be after hours or on weekends. I'm at the stage of my career where that's not a trade-off I'm willing to make anymore. I do some client work on evenings and weekends occasionally, some things just can't always be done during business hours, but those are typically scheduled, and I trade off business hours where I can, so I still am booking to the same standard work week overall.
Summary
I'd be curious how many other freelancers or independent consultants go through a similar exercise in planning their fiscal years. I really don’t tend to do a detailed financial budget for my overall spending, but I did enjoy working through managing my workdays and accounting for all the hours, not just the billable ones.
