Ask most business owners or practice managers where their margin goes and you'll get a shrug. The work got done. The invoices went out. But the numbers never quite add up the way they should, and nobody can point to exactly where the money slipped away.
Usually it slipped away one unlogged hour at a time. A 20-minute client call that never made it onto a timesheet. A site visit recorded a week later from memory. A receipt that was never scanned. A project cost report built from three half-finished spreadsheets nobody fully trusts. None of it feels like a crisis on its own. Added up across a team over a year, it's the difference between a healthy business and one quietly bleeding profit while everyone works just as hard. The fix isn't more reminder emails — it's timesheet software built for professional services firms that makes accurate time tracking the easy option.
It doesn't matter whether you run an architecture practice, an engineering consultancy, a legal firm, an IT services business or any other project-driven organisation. If your team tracks time and expenses in disconnected tools or by memory, you're losing money the work already earned. Quantim was built to stop that. Here's how.
The Revenue Sitting in Unlogged Hours
Studies of professional services firms keep landing on the same uncomfortable figure: somewhere between 15% and 25% of billable time never gets recovered. On a team of ten people billing at £85 an hour, that's roughly £170,000 to £280,000 walking out the door every year. The work happened. It just never made it onto a record anyone could bill from.
On a team of ten at £85/hour, that's £170k–£280k of earned revenue lost every year.
The firms that lose the most are rarely the ones with the least disciplined teams. They're the ones whose time recording tool creates friction. When logging hours is fiddly, people put it off. When they put it off, the details fade. When the details fade, they round down, because nobody wants to overstate. So the honest, well-intentioned behaviour your people follow every day quietly costs the business real money. You don't fix that by sending more reminders. You fix it by making the right behaviour the easy one.
This applies across every sector. An architect who forgets to log a planning review, a consultant who skips a 15-minute call, an engineer who logs travel but not the briefing that followed it: the mechanism is identical wherever you work. The solution is identical too.
Four Ways to Log Time, One for Every Kind of Person
People work differently, and the way a site engineer spends their day looks nothing like the way a senior consultant or a project director does. Quantim gives your team four timesheet formats. Pick whichever fits. They all write to the same data model underneath, so your reports and job costs stay accurate no matter which format each person reaches for.
Daily Timesheet
For people who like the detail. Log the date, job, activity and hours, drop in a quick memo, and you're done. A weekly summary grid shows the full week at a glance so you spot gaps before you submit. Most consultants, project managers and fee earners settle into this one.
Weekly Timesheet
For the batch-it-at-the-end-of-the-week crowd. Fill in all seven days in one sitting. Same accuracy, different rhythm. Suits site staff, field engineers and senior people who keep running notes through the week and tidy up at once.
Timer
Hit start when work begins, hit stop when it ends. Quantim calculates the hours — no guessing later. This is the format that rescues the short, scattered tasks that vanish from a Friday afternoon reconstruction: the quick call, the five-minute design review, the brief client update.
AI Voice Timesheet
Just say it out loud. AI turns your spoken description of the work into a clear, structured timesheet entry. Ideal for anyone on site, on the road or in back-to-back meetings who can't tap at form fields but can speak the moment a piece of work wraps up.
Turning Timesheets into Accurate Job Costing
Recovered hours only matter if you can see what each project actually cost. Because every Quantim timesheet — daily, weekly, timer or voice — writes to one data model, your job costing is live, not a month-end guess. You see labour, expenses and margin per project as the work happens, so you can price the next job from real numbers instead of hope. For architecture, engineering and consultancy firms, that's the difference between quoting on instinct and quoting on evidence. Quantim's project reports turn that data into a clear margin picture in seconds.
Expense Tracking That Doesn't Get Lost
Unbilled expenses leak margin the same way unlogged hours do. Quantim lets your team capture expenses against the right job the moment they happen — snap the receipt, tag the project, done — so reimbursable costs actually make it onto the invoice instead of disappearing into a glovebox. See it all in features and benefits.
Get a live view of billable hours, expenses and profit per project — book a 20-minute Quantim demo.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do you track billable hours accurately?
The most reliable way is to remove friction from logging. Quantim offers four timesheet formats — daily, weekly, a live timer and AI voice entry — so each person records time the moment work happens rather than reconstructing it later, which is where accuracy is lost.
How do you calculate billable hours?
Billable hours are the hours spent on client work that can be invoiced, recorded against a job and charge rate. Quantim multiplies logged hours by each person's rate automatically, so billable value is calculated as the work is entered — not at month end.
What counts as non-billable hours?
Non-billable hours are time worked that can't be charged to a client — internal admin, business development, training or unrecoverable rework. Tracking them alongside billable time shows your true utilisation and where margin is leaking.
How can a team increase billable hours without working longer?
Most firms don't need more hours — they need to capture the ones they already work. Studies show 15–25% of billable time never gets recorded. Making time entry effortless recovers that lost revenue without anyone working a minute more.