Glossary
Bench Time
Also known as: Bench, unallocated time
Bench time is time an employee in a delivery role spends without a billable allocation — between projects, awaiting a start date, or unassigned after a ramp-down. The person is paid; no revenue stands against the cost. The term comes from consulting and IT staffing, where being 'on the bench' is a normal phase between engagements.
Some bench is deliberate: a firm with zero spare capacity cannot start new work or absorb a departure, so 10–20% slack in delivery roles is a common operating choice. The damage comes from bench nobody measures — people idle for weeks because allocation decisions run on stale spreadsheets and month-old utilisation reports.
The visible cost is salary: three people at ₹10 lakh CTC benched for two months is ₹5 lakh with nothing against it. The larger cost is forgone revenue, typically 2–3× the salary figure at market bill rates — plus the attrition risk, because good people leave benches faster than they leave projects.
Bench management is fundamentally a data-freshness problem. Knowing today who rolls off which project next week converts bench from a discovery into a plan: pre-sold work, internal product time, or training with an end date.
How Workclave handles this
In Workclave, allocation is visible from the sessions themselves — when someone's time stops landing on billable projects, they are benched whether or not a spreadsheet says so. That live signal is what makes fast re-staffing possible. bench time cost calculator.
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 →The cost rate is what one hour of a person's time costs the business — salary plus overheads spread over working hours. The bill rate is what a client is charged for that hour. The ratio between them, the multiplier, is where a services firm's entire economics lives: rent, bench, sales, management and profit all have to fit inside it.
Read definition →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.
Read definition →