How do safety consultants track billable vs. non-billable hours?
Safety consultants need a clear system to separate revenue-generating work from overhead. Without it, you can’t calculate your true hourly rate or know which clients are actually profitable.
Start by defining your categories. Billable hours typically include on-site safety audits, OSHA compliance inspections, safety training delivery, incident investigations, and report writing. Travel time depends on how you structure your contracts. Some consultants bill travel at a reduced rate or include a flat travel fee. Others absorb it as overhead. Pick an approach and apply it consistently across all clients.
Non-billable hours cover everything that keeps your business running but doesn’t generate direct revenue. Proposal writing, marketing, administrative tasks, professional development, and research not tied to a specific client all fall into this category.
Track time daily. Trying to reconstruct a week’s worth of hours on Friday afternoon doesn’t work. You’ll forget the 45-minute phone call with a client or underestimate how long that compliance report took. Spend two minutes at the end of each day logging your hours while the work is fresh.
Use client or project codes for every billable entry. A safety consultant working with a manufacturing plant on a six-month compliance project needs to know exactly how many hours went into that engagement. When you’re quoting similar work next year, those records tell you whether you priced it right or underestimated the scope. This kind of tracking is essentially project and job costing applied to a service business.
The simplest setup is a spreadsheet with columns for date, client, task description, billable hours, and non-billable hours. Time tracking apps like Toggl or Clockify work well if you want something more robust. These can generate reports showing your utilization rate, which is your billable hours divided by total hours worked. Most consultants aim for 60 to 70 percent utilization.
Review your time data monthly. Look at which clients consumed more hours than expected. Check whether your non-billable time is creeping up. If you’re spending 15 hours a week on admin tasks, that’s time you could be billing or a sign you need better systems. A Findlay bookkeeper can help you build reports that track profitability by client based on your time data.
Your billable rate needs to cover your non-billable hours too. If you bill 25 hours a week but work 40, your $100 per hour rate is really $62.50 when spread across all your time. Knowing this number prevents underpricing your services and helps you quote future projects more accurately.
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