Automate Time Recording Reminders
A professional services company decreased management effort, while at the same time, increasing billable time.
The Problem
A professional services company billed clients by time and materials, which meant the business was only as profitable as its team’s willingness to actually record their hours. In practice, that willingness was inconsistent. Employees would do the billable work, then forget, delay, or deprioritize logging it, especially at the end of a busy day. The result was not a productivity problem, it was a revenue leak: real work was happening, but a large share of it was never making it onto an invoice.
Chasing this manually does not scale. A manager reminding people individually to log their time is a recurring, unglamorous task that competes with everything else on their plate, and it rarely gets done consistently enough to matter.
The Approach
Rather than adding another manual task to a manager’s day, the fix was built into the systems the team was already using. The business application and an automation tool were connected to send daily email notifications automatically to any employee who had not recorded a full day’s work. The first notification was a simple, low-friction reminder, timed to catch it before the memory of the day’s work faded.
If that first reminder did not result in the time being logged, a second notification escalated the issue to management, after giving the employee a reasonable window to self-correct. This two-step structure mattered: most people just needed a nudge, and only a smaller number needed their manager to actually see the gap. Automating both steps meant nobody had to manually track who still owed their time entries on any given day.
The Result
Daily time recorded increased from 40% to 90%, more than doubling the share of actual billable work that was captured and invoiced. That is not a productivity increase, the team was already doing the work, it is a revenue capture increase: work that was previously happening for free started getting billed for, resulting in a significant increase in invoiced services without hiring anyone new or changing how the team actually worked day to day.
Why This Matters For Your Business
Any business that bills by time and materials has some version of this leak, even if nobody has measured exactly how large it is. The fix is rarely “get people to care more.” It is almost always a process and automation problem: build the reminder into the workflow itself so compliance does not depend on willpower or a manager’s bandwidth to chase it manually.
This is the kind of quiet automation that pays for itself immediately, and it is exactly the sort of workflow we build custom fits for. If your team is billing by the hour and you suspect your invoiced time does not match the work actually happening, see how we approach managed IT and business automation, or request a free assessment to find where your own workflows are leaking revenue.
Automate Time Recording Reminders
A professional services company decreased management effort, while at the same time, increasing billable time.
The Problem
A professional services company billed clients by time and materials, which meant the business was only as profitable as its team’s willingness to actually record their hours. In practice, that willingness was inconsistent. Employees would do the billable work, then forget, delay, or deprioritize logging it, especially at the end of a busy day. The result was not a productivity problem, it was a revenue leak: real work was happening, but a large share of it was never making it onto an invoice.
Chasing this manually does not scale. A manager reminding people individually to log their time is a recurring, unglamorous task that competes with everything else on their plate, and it rarely gets done consistently enough to matter.
The Approach
Rather than adding another manual task to a manager’s day, the fix was built into the systems the team was already using. The business application and an automation tool were connected to send daily email notifications automatically to any employee who had not recorded a full day’s work. The first notification was a simple, low-friction reminder, timed to catch it before the memory of the day’s work faded.
If that first reminder did not result in the time being logged, a second notification escalated the issue to management, after giving the employee a reasonable window to self-correct. This two-step structure mattered: most people just needed a nudge, and only a smaller number needed their manager to actually see the gap. Automating both steps meant nobody had to manually track who still owed their time entries on any given day.
The Result
Daily time recorded increased from 40% to 90%, more than doubling the share of actual billable work that was captured and invoiced. That is not a productivity increase, the team was already doing the work, it is a revenue capture increase: work that was previously happening for free started getting billed for, resulting in a significant increase in invoiced services without hiring anyone new or changing how the team actually worked day to day.
Why This Matters For Your Business
Any business that bills by time and materials has some version of this leak, even if nobody has measured exactly how large it is. The fix is rarely “get people to care more.” It is almost always a process and automation problem: build the reminder into the workflow itself so compliance does not depend on willpower or a manager’s bandwidth to chase it manually.
This is the kind of quiet automation that pays for itself immediately, and it is exactly the sort of workflow we build custom fits for. If your team is billing by the hour and you suspect your invoiced time does not match the work actually happening, see how we approach managed IT and business automation, or request a free assessment to find where your own workflows are leaking revenue.