We always say the quote ‘Time is money’ but when it comes to the practice of timesheet or time recording people have many misconceptions about it:

Misconception about timesheet:

• It’s complex, takes time, or makes us slow.
• It’s an extra expense.
• We’re not billing on hourly rate Our matters are fixed cost mostly.
• I don’t want to monitor my team that minutely.
• Employees think that the firm does not trust

At Legalxgen we come as a Technology, Processes, and Productivity expert for our clients and these are some common arguments we face with most of our new clients. Upon the successful implementation, we’re able to show the benefits and importance of the timesheet in terms of Productivity and the Growth of the law firm.

What we’ve understood ‘timesheet’ is the first step to shift towards a new age law firm and move from a People Dependent to Process Dependent law firm.

Before we begin to discuss the importance and benefits of timesheets, we request you to come out of the Hourly and Fixed fee mindset.

So, here are the top 5 benefits of using time recording practice.

1. Enables you to bill accurately.
   One of the most important aspects of any business are

• Are you getting paid for what you’re delivering to your client?
• And you make sure “you’re not overcharging your clients”.

2. Improves the Productivity & Performance within the team.
   When you’re dealing with people i.e. ‘the team’ how do you justify:

• If your team or any team member is taking an adequate amount of time to complete any assignment or not?
• If taking long, it’s not an offense, you just need to train your team on certain skillsets and ensure that the assignments are completed within the time limits and as per the quality standards.

3. Better track on the Progress of the matter.
   Monitoring of timesheet gives you the ability to access if any assignment or task towards the deliverables is progressing in the right way or not.

4. Ability to compare your Matters and Clients in terms of Profitability.
   To justify this point let’s take an example, suppose the following is the timesheet for a particular period says last month only.

#	Client Name	Time Spent (hrs)	Billed Amount
1	ABC Ventures	4:00	50,000.00
2	PQR Polymers	4:00	30,000.00
3	XYZ Technologies	20:00	100,000.00

Question: Which of your clients do you feel is the most profitable to work with?

Answer: Of course, it’s ‘ABC Ventures’.

Analysis: Let’s analyse the timesheet above to get a little more information

#	Client Name	Time (hrs)	Billed Amount	% Of Time	Ratio, Billing Vs Time
1	ABC Ventures	4:00	50,000.00	14%	12,500.00
2	PQR Polymers	4:00	30,000.00	14%	7,500.00
3	XYZ Technologies	20:00	100,000.00	72%	5,000.00

Now no need to give a bulky explanation of why ‘ABC Ventures is the most profitable and ‘XYZ Technologies is the least profitable client. This is what we achieve with the timesheet.

5. You understand your bandwidth
   The bandwidth it sounds more like an engineering term, but the idea is to identify the people,

• Who’s having enough work?
• Who’s not having sufficient items to work on?
• And no one should be overloaded.

Let’s now have a look at the problem statement above and see how an effective timesheet process can help you to answer and analyse such questions.

 So, this is the timesheet by your team, say for the last week.

#	Associate Name	Hours
1	Will	56
2	John	28
3	Peter	On Leave
4	Sam	08
5	Christina	14

You could easily use the data above to identify the Bandwidth and Productivity within the team.

So still if you are not recording the time or you are simply dumping this data and not analyzing it get started and leverage the benefits.