Tracking Hours is Not Only for Chargeback Organizations
In-house creative services teams with an hourly chargeback model must track their time—often to the quarter-hour increment. The discipline of time tracking can be off-putting for many teams at first, but the advantages of time tracking can’t be ignored, and teams generally support the practice once they understand the potential outcomes. The advantages are so great, that it even makes sense for creative services teams who aren’t chargeback departments to track project time. Time tracking can support staff justification, resource planning, client process changes, project forecasting models, and more. In addition, time tracking provides Creative Executives with quantitative data to speak to their manager and CFO in concrete terms they understand and require for business decisions.
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Jackie Schaffer is VP/General Manager for Cella, where she and her team specialize in optimizing operations at in-house creative organizations. They partner with Creative and Marketing Executives and their teams to evaluate, develop, and execute successful:
- strategic plans and vision statements,
- organizational designs,
career pathing strategies,
- process improvement models,
- metrics-based performance models,
- systems and technology strategies
For more information on Cella, visit www.cellaconsulting.com or email Brendon Derr at b.derr@cellaconsulting.com.
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We are implementing a chargeback system precisely for the reasons listed in this article (love it!)–it’s definitely not to shuffle money from one department to another.
We are tracking time under the categories below. My question is how should we determine what is “billable” (e.g., design, production) and what’s not (e.g., admin, team meetings). For example, I have one deisgner that tracks the time a job spools and prints, even though it’s in the background.
01 – Design
02 – Production
03 – Image Retouching
04 – Research
05 – Meetings
06 – Training
07 – Deliverable Prep
08 – Job Admin
09 – Billable Requests
10 – Technical
11 – General Admin
Hi Tiffany, glad you liked the article…it’s a popular topic with creative leaders.
I can tell you from many conversations with creative leaders and my own personal experience in running a chargeback department, that documenting what is billable versus what is not, is very important. That will allow for consistency in execution (you don’t want clients comparing what one designer versus another bills).
In specific reply to a designer tracking time for printing, job spooling, and other activities that can occur in the background — it’s my opinion that these activities are not billable. If your designer can bill other activities during this time, he shouldn’t be billing the background activity. Back in the day (circa 2002), you couldn’t do anything else while your computer was distilling a postscript, but times have changed and billing practices should reflect that. Most creative services groups are break-even chargeback departments (i.e., not for profit), so teams shouldn’t be looking for opportunities to double bill. In my past role, we actually had a spare computer set up with the multimedia team to run time-heavy automated tasks (mainly video compression and conversion work) while the team member worked on other activities on his or her primary computer.
It’s pretty standard for internal meetings (e.g., team meetings), training, and general admin to be non-billable activities. And if it’s about a project past the original intake conversation, it’s common for the activity to be billable. One exception to consider is training specifically related to a job – I always considered this non-billable but attached the time to the job as a $0/hour charge for R&D (e.g., when a designer needed to learn something new in Flash that pertained specifically to the project).
I’d suggest mapping out a timeline of your major project types and identifying the activities that occur across that timeline. Then attach a billing category (from your list above) to each of those activities. One item I would suggest adding is “Brainstorming” or “Concepting” – something that captures the creative process outside of the execution of design.
Good luck!
Thank you, so much. More great info. I really appreciate it!
Our web design and development agency, Pelago, has worked alongside several in-house creative services teams. It is true that time tracking is essential for these teams. We eventually developed a time tracking app, Intervals, that is being used by a lot of in-house creative services teams. I highly recommend checking it out if you need a web-based app to help track time at the granular level suggested in this article.
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