As a business owner, the last thing you would want is to miss out on potential earnings. Doing business the right way is all about churning out maximum revenue from minimum resources. One of the biggest reasons many businesses fail to do this is because of reduced billable hours.
In this post, we will study billable hours in detail:
What Are Billable Hours?
Keeping track of billable hours and differentiating them from non-billable hours is one of the biggest challenges for any business.
When working for a client you will charge them for the number of billable hours you worked. These are the hours that were directly spent on getting the clients’ work done. The number of hours spent on designing the client’s website could be an example of billable hours.
At the same time, the number of hours you spent on recruiting workers for the task, carrying out office management tasks and training team members will not count as billable hours. This way, a lot of productive hours are unfortunately lost and not counted.
As a business owner, if you want to determine whether your hours are billable or not, let us help you out. The hours are billable:
- If they help the project move closer to its completion date.
- If they benefit the client more than they benefit you.
- If the details of the task are similar to what was outlined in the initial proposal.
- If the task was carried out on the client’s request in particular.
Benefits of Higher Billable Hours
The equation is simple. The higher the number of billable hours, the higher will be your earnings. Often, businesses lose out on the billable hours because they have to deal with issues like downtime and troubleshooting. This usually works against businesses. Many a time, the number of hours that indirectly affect the client’s projects aren’t considered billable. As a result, the business’s earnings suffer.
This is the reason businesses try to reduce the time spent on other activities that may not be directly linked to the client’s projects.
Here’s how QuickBooks may help you achieve the said targets:
Mobility
An accountant is just like any other employee who might have several tasks to attend to throughout the day. Other than running errands and picking up kids from the school, they also might need to travel abroad to attend workshops and seminars.
As long as the accountants have access to QuickBooks, they can continue working on the same projects that they could have finished while in the office. Remote access and flexibility of work are two of the biggest advantages of QuickBooks. They can not only access accounting data from a remote location but can also share their work across the board. This way, they neither miss out on work nor the travel activity. As a result, the number of lost billable hours may significantly fall.
Continued Customer Support
As mentioned earlier, IT issues are one of the biggest causes of lost number of billable hours. If your business has just started out and is in its startup phase, you probably won’t have an in-house IT team as of yet. This means that you can’t immediately get back to work every time the system unexpectedly crashes. Deploying a dedicated IT team isn’t a financially viable option for every business.
In the case of QuickBooks, all of these concerns can be ruled out. This is because your QuickBooks cloud hosting service provider will take up the responsibility of helping you deal with all sorts of technical issues. In most cases, the team resolves the issues on-the-go, and before you even realize that they exist. Other than that, the team can only be contacted either through the service’s online portal or other contact information. This way, you can focus more on your core operations rather than worrying about the issues.
Increased Collaboration
Imagine a situation in which your accountants rely on manual data sharing; sending accounting data across the company through emails and flash drives. The process is very time-intensive and might not always work. If you’re waiting for an accountant to email you a large file so you can start working on it, you’re wasting your time. The same time could be utilized in nearing the project completion deadlines. Plus, if you end up downloading the same files multiple times, you might even have to deal with multi-versioning.
QuickBooks makes the entire process a lot easier and faster. There is no need to download the files or exchange flash drives. All the data is available through a shared cloud platform. All the authorized personnel can view, edit, and share data at the same time. This helps you save up on time and, consequently, increase the number of billable hours.
The author is a regular contributor to the website and has years of experience in the field of ERP. Learn more about the company’s services on their website.
Accountant working -DepositPhotos
