Glossary
Billable Hours
Also known as: Chargeable hours
Billable hours are the units of work time that can be charged to a client under a contract or engagement. They exclude internal activities like admin, training, or bench time that the client does not pay for. For services firms, billable hours are the direct link between effort and revenue.
In an IT services or agency model, revenue is often a function of how many hours the team spends on client-approved work. Every hour spent but not captured as billable is revenue that quietly leaks away, which is why disciplined tracking of billable versus non-billable time is central to profitability.
Billable hours require more than a daily present or absent flag. You need to know which project each block of time went to, whether it falls within the contracted scope, and whether the client has approved it. That granularity turns raw attendance into an invoice you can defend.
Leakage happens when hours are reconstructed from memory at week end, when non-billable work is misclassified, or when approved overtime is never invoiced. Capturing time at the session level, tied to a project and an approval, is the most reliable defence against this leakage.
How Workclave handles this
In Workclave every work session is project-linked and approved, so billable time is captured as it happens rather than reconstructed later. That approved, project-tagged record becomes a defensible basis for client invoices and reduces revenue leakage. stop billable hours leakage.
Related terms
Utilisation rate is the percentage of an employee's available working time that is spent on billable client work. It is a core efficiency and profitability metric for IT services firms and agencies. A higher utilisation generally means more of your paid capacity is generating revenue.
Read definition →A timesheet is a record of how an employee's working time was distributed across tasks, projects, or clients over a period. It underpins billing, payroll, and productivity analysis in services businesses. Timesheets can be filled manually or generated from tracked work sessions.
Read definition →Session-based tracking records attendance as discrete work sessions, each with a start, an end, and a project, rather than a single daily clock-in and clock-out. A day can contain several sessions across different projects, breaks, or locations. This produces a far richer and more accurate picture of how time was actually spent.
Read definition →Overtime (OT) is the additional compensation owed when an employee works beyond the normal daily or weekly hours set by law or contract. In India, statutory overtime is generally paid at a premium rate, commonly twice the ordinary wage for covered workers. Accurate hour tracking is essential to calculate it correctly.
Read definition →