In a service business, time is the main cost. Yet in many teams a large part of the hours people actually work never reaches a timesheet. The project then looks cheaper than it was, the next quote repeats the mistake, and nobody can say which client takes the most effort.
The free PLYNTUM business scan asks three questions in its Time category: whether the team tracks its working time, roughly what share of worked hours gets logged, and how many hours a week one person spends in internal meetings. In the scan’s published bands, logging more than 84% of worked hours is the lowest-risk answer; logging a quarter or less is among the highest.
Where the hours go missing
- Reconstruction at the end of the week. People fill in the timesheet on Friday from memory and calendars. Short tasks, calls and interruptions are forgotten.
- Switching between clients. Ten minutes here and twenty there are real work, but they feel too small to record.
- Time logged to the wrong place. Hours go to a general “admin” bucket instead of the task, so they exist but explain nothing.
- Distrust. If time tracking feels like monitoring, people record the minimum. Tools that take screenshots or log keystrokes make this worse.
Why it matters beyond the timesheet
Unlogged time is not free time. It is effort the business paid for but cannot see. It hides which clients are expensive to serve, makes estimates look better than they are and turns every pricing conversation into a guess. It also makes capacity planning unreliable: a team that looks 70% busy on paper may be fully booked.
A practical way to fix it
- Agree what gets time. Client work, internal projects, sales and administration each need a clear place. If a category is missing, people will not know where to put the hours.
- Log against the task, not the day. An hour on a task says what the hour was for. An hour on a date says nothing.
- Log daily. Two minutes at the end of each day is more accurate than half an hour on Friday.
- Keep review and approval as separate steps. The person checks their own entries first; a manager approves them afterwards. Invoice only from approved time.
- Look at the gaps together. Compare logged hours with contracted hours each week. A gap is a question to ask, not a mistake to punish.
What unlogged hours cost: a worked example
A six-person team is contracted for 152 hours each a month, 912 in total. The timesheets show 730. If the hours actually worked are close to the contract, about 180 hours a month are missing, more than one full-time person.
At a cost of 25 an hour, that is 4,500 a month of effort the company pays for but cannot assign to a client. Part of it is internal work that needs its own category. The part that is client work makes projects look cheaper than they were: if all 180 hours belonged to clients, the recorded cost would be about 20% too low, and the next quote would repeat the error.
The figures are an example. To run your own, compare recorded hours with contracted hours for the last full month.
Meetings are part of the picture
Internal meetings are real time, and they compete with client work. The scan scores up to two hours a week per person as low risk and more than twelve as high risk. Measuring it is simple: count one ordinary week of internal meetings for a few people. If status meetings dominate, a written update kept with the work often replaces most of them.
Respect the person
Time tracking works when people trust it. Record what the work needs, such as the task, the client and the duration, and nothing that feels like watching someone. Let the person see and correct their own record before anyone else does.
How PLYNTUM supports this
Time tracking, timesheets and attendance are available on every PLYNTUM plan, and logged time is linked to the task and the client, so it explains project cost. Private desktop and browser capture is in development and is designed to record only application names, domains and active duration: no screenshots, keystrokes, page contents or document titles. Read more about time tracking.
To see how your team scores, take the free business scan.
To start without new software, use the free timesheet template; to compare tools, read the time tracking software guide.
