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Recording time on site: why hours shrink on the way to the office

Hours do not go missing while the work is being done. They go missing on the way to the invoice, and they always go missing in the same direction: down. Nobody reconstructs a Thursday and rounds up.

Why it is always downwards

Because the person typing it up is not certain, and being uncertain in the customer's favour feels safer than the alternative. Twenty minutes here, half an hour there, an early start nobody wrote down. Across a team over a year the total is not small — it is comfortably a wage — and none of it appears in any report, because unbilled hours leave no trace.

The distance is the problem

Everything about accurate hours comes down to how far the record travels from the moment. Booked as it happens: accurate. Written on a pad at the end of the day: mostly accurate. Reconstructed on a Sunday from memory and a diary: a story about the week.

Which means the practical question is not "how do we get people to fill in timesheets properly". It is "how do we make recording take five seconds at the moment it happens".

What to keep separate

• Labour on the job — the hours that are billable.
• Travel between jobs. Whether you charge it or absorb it, you want to know how much there is.
• Call-out time, where it is charged differently.
• Waiting time and abortive visits. These are invisible in most firms and they cost real money.
• Non-job time: yard, workshop, training, quoting.

That last category is the one that answers the pricing question. Non-job time is what makes your billable ratio what it is, and the billable ratio is what makes your rate what it needs to be.

Corrections have to be easy

A system that makes it hard to fix a booking gets fewer bookings, not more accurate ones. People stop recording rather than record something they cannot correct. Let an entry be changed with a reason attached, and you get a record that is honest instead of one that is tidy.

What to do with them

Two things, and they are both worth more than the record itself. The hours go straight onto the invoice without being retyped, which removes the step where they shrink. And they sit next to what was priced — see what the job actually cost — which is the only reliable feedback a quoting process ever gets.