Staff in the professional services sector are often slogging it out all day and well into the night for their clients, trying to drive results and revenue for business owners. But our new report shows that despite all this hard work, at least 1 in 5 of these hours is not tracked on timesheets, and as a result cannot be billed back to the client.  

We surveyed over 1,200 managers across the USA, the UK and Australia for our new report, The Global Timesheets Benchmark Report. The results show that time tracking remains an ongoing challenge for the professional services sector, and inaccurate timesheet tracking is costing thousands of dollars every year for each employee. 

Managers estimate 21.5% of hours are not billed 

We asked managers and business owners their perception of lost billable hours and they estimated on average 21.5% or 1 in every 5 billable hours are not tracked.

Lost Billable Hours-Lost Revenue (USD)

The estimated loss in revenue equates to USD $50K per employee per year 

In the USA, the average professional service employee loses USD 63,807 per year due to lost billable hours, compared to AUD 51,855 (USD 37,781) in Australia and GBP 36,887 (USD 50,516) in the UK*. These results demonstrate a huge loss of revenue for professional service businesses globally.

*For a breakdown of 3rd party data sources used to calculate these figures, please see the appendix section of The Global Timesheets Benchmark Report. 

Top 10 industries

The top 10 breakdowns of managers' perception of lost billable hours by industry: 

  1. Advertising and Marketing
  2. Banking & Insurance 
  3. Websites & Hosting 
  4. Real Estate (Residential & Commercial) 
  5. Software, IT & Support 
  6. Lawyers & Legal Services 
  7. Construction & Engineering
  8. Consulting & Accounting 
  9. Photo, Film & Video 
  10. Other professional services

Download our full report to see % the results for each of these industries, along with additional information on average hourly rates, billable utilization rates and industry-specific figures for the professional services sector. 

Download timesheets benchmark whitepaper by Tribes

The better way to track time

Tribes.AI allows organizations to completely automate time tracking across their teams’ work tools without installing software. As a result, it tracks significantly more billable hours than manual timesheets and frees employee time for more profitable work.

Try a free trial of Tribes.AI’s automated time tracking now.

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