Controlling time is a fundamental need for professional services firms
At EYE OF WHALE, we believe that an accountancy firm is a “service production plant”, where staff costs represent 80% of total costs. Employee time is therefore a key driver for monitoring the business.
In an accountancy firm, it is very common to feel that some clients generate losses because they consume a great deal of time, call frequently, fail to provide documents on time, make it difficult to meet deadlines, or simply require a level of service that does not match the price they are charged.
Conversely, we also observe that some clients make our work easier, with smooth communication and mutual trust, and we intuitively perceive them as profitable.
However, when you have more than 300 clients and offer around 60 different services, intuition is no longer enough to make sound strategic and operational decisions.
🐳 To go beyond intuition, we have created “THE TIME TRACKING APPLICATION” for each employee — including the manager — which allows them to continuously record their activity throughout the working day: what they are doing, for which client, and when each task starts and ends.
This is a revolution based on a humanistic approach, not merely the creation of a technical tool. Let me explain: asking each person to record what they are doing at any given moment requires effort and means sharing their “working life” with a high degree of transparency. Everyone — owner, manager and employees — is fully aware that this implies a major responsibility in how the data is used.
We work with a clear purpose 🐳: to use the data to build a profitability matrix by client and service, and to identify which actions consume the most time and therefore require a priority approach to improve process efficiency and make the accountancy firm more competitive.
The aim is not to control how long people rest, nor any other personal aspects. In fact, we agreed — owner, manager and the whole team together — that if the data were used for any purpose other than improvement, the initiative would be stopped immediately and the tool removed. This point is non-negotiable.
After 11 months of implementation in the first accountancy firm where we deployed the tool, and thanks to the excellent collaboration of the team, we recorded 18,488 hours: a true treasure.
Now, the manager uses data — date, employee, action and client — to meet with clients and explain what is happening, opening the door to solutions. Clients often ask: “What can I do to help you?” They value the high level of professionalism of the accountancy firm and understand that they consume valuable time that must be billed correctly.
