At 8 fee earners on 37h 30m a week over 45 chargeable weeks, moving from 60% to 66% takes 27m more chargeable time per person per day and leaves 12h 45m a week each for bids, admin, CPD and management. That is 810 more chargeable hours a year, worth about £68,900, and only if the work exists to fill them, they are charged at the rate you entered, and they are invoiced and paid.
Starting shapes, not benchmarks. Each one sets team size, contracted hours and chargeable weeks only. None of them touches your utilisation percentages, your rate or your realisation, because those are yours to supply.
Those two percentages start at round numbers so the tool has something to draw. They are not a benchmark and not a typical figure. Take your current utilisation from your own reports and replace them.
Per fee earner, on top of the chargeable time they already record, spread over a five day week. This one does not depend on how many weeks a year you work: the daily change is the same at 45 chargeable weeks or 52.
Per fee earner. Practice managers plan in weeks, and a week is where a target either fits into people's diaries or plainly does not.
That is how much extra output the gap is worth in a year without hiring anyone. It is a capacity fact rather than money sitting on a table: the hours only become fees if there is sold work to put them on.
What one percentage point of utilisation is worth across the team in a year, in invoiced fees after your realisation. It is a straight rate of exchange, so divide any fee target by it and you get the percentage points that target needs. Planning mode does exactly that sum, which means you can check this tool against itself.
Two more free tools sit alongside this one. If your problem is chargeable work that never reaches a timesheet at all, rather than time recorded in the wrong bucket, use the timesheet ROI calculator. If you just need the hours between a start and a finish for one day or one week, use the hours worked calculator.
A utilisation rate is one division: chargeable hours divided by the hours a person was available to work, expressed as a percentage. Everything else on this page follows from getting those two numbers right.
Chargeable means recorded against a client job and flagged as chargeable, whether or not it is ultimately invoiced. Recording an hour as chargeable is a coding decision rather than a billing decision, so an hour can be chargeable and still never reach an invoice. On the other side of the line sit bids and business development, marketing, practice and finance administration, line management and appraisals, CPD, quality assurance and internal review, and rework the practice carries at its own cost. Some of that is waste. Much of it, particularly bids and CPD, is what creates next year's chargeable work, which is why the aim is an optimum rather than a maximum.
Fifty two weeks is not a working year. Statutory annual leave in the UK is 5.6 weeks under the Working Time Regulations 1998, and an employer may count bank holidays within that entitlement. Bank holidays themselves differ across the UK, with eight in England and Wales, nine in Scotland and ten in Northern Ireland, so a practice with offices in more than one nation does not have a single figure at all. That is why chargeable weeks a year is an input here rather than a constant. At 37.5 contracted hours over 45 chargeable weeks, one person is available for 1,687.5 hours a year and a team of eight for 13,500, and those are the numbers utilisation should be measured against.
Add up the hours in a normal week that cannot go to a client whatever you sell: the team meeting, the appraisal, the timesheet and finance admin, mandatory CPD, line management, the quality review. Divide that by contracted hours and take it off one hundred per cent, and you have your practical ceiling. Five fixed internal hours in a 37.5 hour week put the ceiling at 86.7 per cent, and a target above it is unreachable arithmetically rather than culturally. The calculator draws that ceiling on the bar before you cross it, and says so plainly when a target goes past it.
Utilisation is how attended time splits between client work and internal work. Realisation is how much of the value of that chargeable time survives to an invoice, once write downs, fee caps, fixed fee overruns and courtesy discounts have been applied. Collection is what finally reaches the bank, after credit notes, disputes and bad debt. Recovery is used in two senses in UK practice, sometimes interchangeably with realisation and sometimes to mean whether the fee on a job covers the resource cost of delivering it, so it is worth agreeing which one your own reports mean before comparing them with anything here. The three move independently: a busy team can be highly utilised and still recover poorly.
| Measure | What it divides | Formula |
|---|---|---|
| Utilisation | Attended time | chargeable hours ÷ available hours |
| Realisation | Time value | fees invoiced ÷ (chargeable hours × standard rate) |
| Collection | Invoiced value | cash collected ÷ fees invoiced |
The panel prints hours first and pounds second, and every figure in it is invoiced value except one row that is labelled otherwise. Here is what each line means.
Available hours times your current utilisation times your charge-out rate times your realisation. It is invoiced fee value at your own numbers, not cash: credit notes, disputed invoices and aged debt all sit between an invoice and the bank, so an hour is not money until it is paid.
The same line with the target substituted, which is why the difference between the two rows is exactly the gap row beneath them. That difference only becomes money if there is sold work to put the hours on. Utilisation is capped by what you have sold, not by willingness. Once the hours are sold and recorded, turning them into a fee is the mechanical part, and you can see a timesheet become an invoice if you want to watch that step.
Hours first, then fee value. The monthly figure is the annual figure divided by twelve, and the annual figure was built from your chargeable weeks, so it describes an average month rather than a peak one. We never take a week and multiply it by 4.33. That method quietly assumes 52 chargeable weeks and therefore that nobody takes annual leave, and it overstates the answer by 52 divided by your chargeable weeks: 15.6 per cent at 45 weeks, and still about 12 per cent even at the statutory minimum entitlement. Lower the realisation slider and a second gap row appears showing the same hours at your rate card, so the distance between what you record and what you invoice is on screen rather than folded into the rate.
Contracted hours times the move in percentage points, divided by five. Six points on a 37.5 hour week is 27 minutes a person a day, or 2 hours 15 minutes a week, which lands better with anyone who plans in weeks. Chargeable weeks cancel out of that sum entirely, so the daily change is identical at 45 weeks or 52, which surprises most people. Two warnings go with the figure. A rising utilisation rate can simply mean people are working longer, which prices goodwill rather than capacity and stores up attrition. And a team average of 60 per cent can be three people at 90 and two at 35, which is a completely different problem from everybody being slightly under, and only one of the two is solved by anyone changing their daily habits.
None of these is software. Three of them are decisions, and the fourth is a measurement problem that happens to be the one a timesheet can fix.
If timesheets are late or incomplete, your measured utilisation is understated and part of your gap is a measurement failure rather than a behaviour one. Nobody's day changes when that is fixed, only the record does. It is also exactly why this figure must never be added to the unbilled hours estimate on our timesheet ROI calculator: the two overlap and you would be counting the same pounds twice. Good timesheet software makes recording the easy path rather than the Friday afternoon chore.
A split reconstructed from memory at month end is a guess with a decimal point on it. Set activities up as chargeable and non-chargeable activities so the coding decision is made while the work is fresh, by the person who did it, and the percentage becomes something you can act on rather than argue with.
Averages hide their own distribution, and an annual average also hides bid periods, project starts, August and Christmas. Look at where each person sits against their own target before concluding you need another pair of hands, which is what how resource planning works in Quantim is for. Half a fee earner's worth of unused capacity spread across eight people is a scheduling question, not a recruitment one.
A target nobody can see their position against is a number in a spreadsheet. Set it per person rather than practice wide, because a director who sells the work will sit structurally lower than a delivery architect, and blending the two produces a figure that describes nobody. Setting it weekly rather than annually is what makes it early enough to act on.
One honest limit applies to all four. On fixed fee and capped fee jobs, extra chargeable hours add cost against a fee that is already agreed, so utilisation rises while margin falls, and the answer inverts. Software measures the number and captures hours that were being lost. It does not sell work, hire people, or decide that a Thursday afternoon moves from internal to client.
This page gives you an estimate from figures you supplied. Quantim gives you the real number, from time your team records as the work happens.
Each staff member has a utilisation limit set against them in Quantim, which is the target that person is measured against rather than a practice wide average that describes nobody. It is the figure their own weekly summary compares their chargeable hours with.
Quantim lets you create billable and non billable activities so administration is separated from project work, which is what makes staff utilisation measurable in the first place. The split is recorded as people fill in their timesheets rather than reassembled from memory afterwards.
Quantim's time tracking reports assess staff utilisation rates and compare billable against non billable time, alongside profitability, work in progress and fee recovery, and its resource reports give managers a live view of capacity, workload and utilisation across the team. See utilisation and profitability reports for what the suite covers.
Daily and weekly timesheets, hourly entries, a timer and AI voice entry, plus the mobile app and the watch app for time that happens away from a desk. The Quantim mobile app also shows each person their own weekly utilisation summary, split between chargeable and non chargeable hours, against the utilisation limit set for them. Recorded time flows through to fee invoicing, and you can push fees through to your accounts system from there.
Stated plainly, because the difference matters. Quantim shows you this number accurately and weekly, so you can decide whether the gap is worth chasing and who it actually belongs to. It does not close the gap for you. If you want to know what that costs, see plans and pricing.
What differs between these practices is the shape of the non chargeable half, not a target number. This page will not tell you what your peers run at, because we cannot evidence it.
RIBA work stages, competition and feasibility work often carried at the practice's own cost, mandatory CPD under RIBA and ARB schemes, and design development absorbed inside a fixed fee. The fixed fee point matters most here: on a capped fee, extra chargeable hours add cost rather than income. Written for architecture practices and interior design studios.
Forty hour contracts are more common than 37.5, technical checking and quality assurance is structurally non chargeable, framework and tender bidding is heavy and lumpy, and site time is chargeable but frequently recorded days after it happened. Change the contracted hours input before you read anything else. Written for engineering consultancies and EPC contractors.
Travel and inspection time, RICS CPD, and the prior question of whether time is charged out at all or carried as a project cost. Where the hour is not the unit of sale, utilisation is a cost control measure rather than a revenue one, and the fee value column should be read as capacity value. Written for surveying practices and property developers.
Time between engagements is the visible cost, presales and proposal writing sits firmly on the non chargeable side, blended rates hide the widest grade spread of any of these sectors, and utilisation tends to be watched weekly rather than at the year end. Written for IT and management consultants.
There are more questions about Quantim in the main FAQ.
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See what unrecorded billable hours cost your practice over a year, and what capturing them could recover. Includes a charge-out rate and margin calculator.
Open the ROI calculator →Work out the hours between a start and a finish, less unpaid breaks, in hours and minutes and in decimal hours. Overnight shifts and a full week included.
Open the hours calculator →Play through the whole flow: log time against a job, review the fees it earns, then raise the fee invoice. No signup, nothing to install.
Open the demo →Enter your hourly rate, contracted hours and overtime hours at your contract multiplier and see gross overtime pay, effective hourly rate and the annual cost.
Open the overtime calculator →A target only means something once somebody is measuring against it every week, on figures people recorded while the work was happening. Try Quantim free for a month and see your real split between chargeable and non chargeable time instead of estimating it once. No credit card needed. Free data migration. Cancel anytime.
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