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Billable Hours

We are a small agency, with 10 people in one office and 4 in another. We would like to know two things.

1) In regards to staff time, what percentage of total hours per day/month do you expect to be billable to client work, especially for creative staff?

2) At what point do you determine that a position/person needs assistance, i.e. when to hire another copywriter? Is it when they are working at a certain percentage over the required billable hours, and for what period of time must this be happening, for example, a period of weeks or months?

Thanks for your help.

Lisa Vorst

We try to make sure they are 80% billable. Creative usually makes the 80% target. We will only hire somebody if the business warrants the need and make sure they are billable. If it does not we hire a freelancer and make sure they are close to 100% billable.

Ed Miller

Our creative people range from 70 - 95% billable, with most falling in the 85 - 90% area.

For your second question, it's a little hard to answer, but when you are abusing your current staff with too much overtime or are spending too much on freelancers, it's time to hire new people!

We rely pretty heavily on freelancers due to the normal ups and downs in business, and this works very well for us. However, this past year, we added staff, and our overall expenses dropped very noticeably since we weren't paying the higher rates for freelancers. Even with employee benefits factored in, staff people are usually a much better bang for the buck!

Catherine Colangelo The Phillips Agency

We are fairly new to C&P, so I don't feel like we have a great system yet - here are a few things that are working for us.

The AE determines that the job is ready to bill and changes the status code on the job ticket to 100. I have it set up that when a job code is changed to 100 (ready to bill) it generates an email to me. I then print the job progress report which goes to the ae for adjustment/comments. I generate the invoice.

The description is in the job ticket. The AE is responsible to be sure that this is the information that they want to appear on the invoice as we do grand total billing only. When you bill, if you select show job description, it will appear on the invoice

Susan B. Levey Business Manager Caudill and Associates, Inc.

We print out the open job report at the beginning of the month and see how much time/costs are in the unbilled column. Then we ask the account executive if they can bill the job if it is over 2000.00.

The AE generates the billing

The AE writes description for services

The description is written when billed

The AE decides this by looking at the costs vs the estimate (how much to charge)

Suzanne Nolan