Billable Hours

This is where agency revenue comes from. Every hour a team member spends on client-facing work — design, development, strategy, whatever you bill for — counts as billable. Internal meetings, admin, pitching new business? Non-billable. Both are necessary, but only one pays the bills.

The Billable Ratio

Take a developer who works 40 hours a week. If 30 of those go toward client projects, their billable ratio is 75%. Multiply those 30 hours by the project's hourly rate — say €120 — and that person generates €3,600 in weekly revenue.

Most agencies aim for a team-wide billable ratio between 65% and 80%. The exact target depends on your business model, but here's the thing people get wrong:

100% billable is a red flag, not a goal. If every single hour is client work, nobody's doing internal improvements, nobody's mentoring juniors, and nobody's thinking strategically about the next quarter. You'll ship more this month and regret it in three.

Where Hours Leak

• Context switching between too many projects — 15 minutes here, 20 there, none of it trackable
• Scope creep that doesn't get re-estimated or re-allocated
• Meetings that should've been a Slack message

WrkSched ties every allocation to a specific project, so when you pull reports, you see exactly how many hours went where. That visibility is what separates agencies that know their profitability from agencies that guess at it.

The real question isn't "are people busy?" — it's "are people busy on the right things?" Pair billable hours with your utilization rate and you'll have the answer.