timetrackingbuddy.com Blog

In yesterday’s Small Business section of the WSJ, Kelly Spors fielded a question from a reader who charges by the hour, and had “yet to come up with an acceptable means of tracking his time.”

Kelly writes that “Many professionals, believe it or not, still use pen, paper and calculator to keep track of client billable hours.”

Link to full article (subscription required)

This jives with what we’ve seen in the marketplace. Very few professionals even seem to use the stopwatch tools provided within many current standard time tracking systems, as the effort of starting and stopping the stopwatch turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth.

Inevitably, many professionals end up with gaps in their time at the end of their billing cycle. One of our beta users, an attorney in Southern California, mentioned to me on the phone yesterday that he primarily uses Time Tracking Buddy to fill in these gaps.

For example, if he has only two hours of time accounted for from last Tuesday, he can reference TTB to piece together the rest of his day – which emails did he send, which search terms did he put into Lexis Nexis, which docs did he work on – to figure out what he was working on.

Though I was initially surprised by the widespread reliance on “old-fashioned” means, maybe I shouldn’t have been – I still carry my spiral notebook just about everywhere I go for taking notes by hand myself.

This has taught us that we should build our product to be a nice compliment to the traditional old school methodologies of tracking time – and if we can save people time and frustration in accounting for lost time, and help them find more of it, we’ll have a valuable product and business.

Nice article in the Colorado Springs Business Journal about the problems that exist with the billable hour in the legal world.

I found this quote particularly interesting:

“The problems are pretty straightforward,” said Michael Goess, Sullivan professor at the John J. Sullivan Endowed Chair in Free Enterprise at Regis University. “Any time you have to keep track of everything you do during the day, it’s a pain in the neck — or other region of the anatomy.”

From my conversations with local attorneys, it seems that while most firms have entertained the idea of moving away from billable hours, the entire systems of billing for time is very ingrained in the culture.

In fact, a lawyer I spoke with this morning said that her firm’s clients would not accept a move away from the billable hour – thus she does not foresee any changes in the way they bill in the near future.