Glossary
Scope Creep
Also known as: Requirement creep
Scope creep is the gradual expansion of what a project delivers without a matching change in its price or timeline. Each addition is small — one more revision, a extra report, a 'quick' integration — and none triggers a renegotiation. The scope grows; the fee does not; the margin absorbs the difference.
Creep thrives on ambiguity and goodwill. Loosely written statements of work leave the boundary between included and extra undefined, and delivery teams default to saying yes because the relationship matters. The cost surfaces months later as a fixed-fee project that somehow consumed 140% of its estimated hours.
Time data is the earliest available detector. A project burning hours faster than its deliverables are completing, or accumulating effort under vague task labels, is creeping before anyone names it. Weekly budget-versus-actual review catches in week three what invoice review discovers in month three — after the margin is gone.
The control mechanism is the change order: a lightweight, pre-agreed path for pricing additions as they arise. Teams avoid change orders because raising one feels confrontational; in practice, clients respect a firm that tracks its scope, and the alternative is silently billing your own margin for the client's additions.
How Workclave handles this
Workclave shows each project's consumed hours against its budget while the project runs, so creep appears as a trend line rather than a post-mortem. The session-level record also documents exactly what the extra effort was — the evidence a change-order conversation needs. project time tracking with approvals.
Related terms
A write-off is recorded work removed or reduced before invoicing — hours the team spent that the client is never asked to pay for. Write-offs happen at billing review, when a partner or account lead trims entries that overran the estimate, look indefensible, or would trigger an awkward conversation. The difference between hours worked and hours billed is the firm's realisation gap.
Read definition →Revenue leakage is value the firm earned but never invoiced: hours worked and not recorded, recorded and written off, covered by scope the contract never priced, or billed at rates that were never escalated. Unlike a lost deal, leakage is invisible — the work happened, the cost was paid in salaries, and the revenue simply failed to appear.
Read definition →Project margin is what remains of an engagement's revenue after the cost of delivering it — primarily the hours consumed, priced at each contributor's cost rate. A ₹6 lakh project that consumes 320 hours at a ₹900 blended cost rate has a delivery cost of ₹2.88 lakh and a gross margin of 52%.
Read definition →Retainer burn is the rate at which a client consumes the hours their monthly retainer purchases. A client on a 40-hour retainer who has used 34 hours by the 20th is at 85% burn with a third of the month remaining. Burn tracking is what makes a retainer a managed product rather than an all-you-can-eat subscription.
Read definition →