The partner at a 40-person engineering services firm told me her utilisation was around 78%. She was confident. She’d been tracking it for years. Then we asked the engineers to log their time the same day they did the work.
Utilisation came out at 61%. The difference, over a year, was roughly 2,300 hours — work that had been done but never billed, or billed under a fixed fee that should never have been fixed.
The leak nobody wanted to look at
Time was being recorded on Friday afternoons, from memory, for the whole week. That’s not dishonesty. It’s just how humans work. People remember meetings and big tasks, and they forget the two-hour troubleshooting call on Tuesday that nobody scheduled.
Worse, those forgotten hours were invisible to project managers. So a project that was running 30 hours over budget looked fine until the invoice went out and the margin had already evaporated.
What actually changed
Three things, and the first one is the one people resist.
- Time entered daily, in three minutes or less. One screen, project code, hours, done. No descriptions required for routine work.
- Project budgets visible to the people doing the work, not just to the partners. If you’re at 85% of budget with 40% of the job left, you should know that on Tuesday.
- Any work outside the original scope gets flagged in the moment and priced before it becomes free advice.
The daily entry rule lasted, but only after the firm dropped the requirement to write a description for every line. Cutting the form from nine fields to three raised compliance from 40% to 96% in six weeks.
The uncomfortable conversation
Once change requests were being recorded, the firm discovered it had been absorbing an average of 14 extra hours per client project, worth about £90,000 a year across the business.
Some clients pushed back. Most didn’t. The ones who did were mostly relieved to have clarity about what was included and what wasn’t — the fog had been costing them too.
Within a year, revenue per engineer rose 19% without a single rate increase. The work was always there. It just wasn’t being seen, and unseen work never gets invoiced.
An ERPNext Consulting engagement at this stage is less about systems and more about visibility: who sees what, and when. That’s what turned this firm around.
Try one thing next week. Ask your team to log their time the same day, even if it’s rough. Compare that week’s total against how you’d normally record it. The gap between those two numbers is the money you’re already leaving on the table.