Own Your Time Own Your Job
Own Your Time
At Wholegrain we respect and value ownership and independence, it is appreciated that your can take the responsibility to managing and adjusting your working hours, and locating your hours and resource properly.
Sometime you would find it is not as easy as it sounds in the sentence, don’t worry, there is always support on the way. Normally we will have regular reports and data analysis to help our team improve the utilisation of our resources and explore different ways to maintain projects within budget. If there is anyone have questions on how to record/manage their time and resource, our Project Coordinator will come to help straightaway. It is normal that sometime we can forget to record our time, or missing couple of hours, it is ok. Yet if there are repetitive patterns of incorrectly time management situations which have a negative impact on our projects, we will invite the stakeholders to a meeting to discuss the situations and aim to fix it all together.
Billable Hours in Wholegrain
What is Billable?
Hours that we can bill the client for ( i.e. The time spent on client projects that is not sales and marketing). This includes work that is charged hourly and work on fixed price projects.
Why are Billable Hours necessary?
Billable Hours are what we charge our clients, which generate business income for us, and business income are where our salaries come from.
Why do we need to record Billable Hours?
In a nut shell, we record Billable hours to make sure we charge clients correctly so we have enough money to pay ourselves.
If we don’t measure the hours spent on billable work, it is difficult to know how many hours we need to clock to ensure we have financial stability within the business. We bill clients for ad-hoc time spent on their projects. Billing correctly for all hours regularly helps us produce more accurate estimates for fixed price projects. This is key to charging our clients in a way that is fair to us and to them, and helps ensure the financial viability of our livelihoods.
What are non-Billable Hours?
Non Billable Hours are hours spent on tasks that we will never bill clients for. This could be internal projects, your own training time, internal non-client related conversations, admin work, team calls, sales and marketing – such as blog writing, fixing internal website issues, building our own landing pages and so on. You get the idea!
Billable Roles in Wholegrain
Am I Billable or not?
If most or part of your daily working hours we can bill our clients for, you are one of the Billable roles in Wholegrain. This includes Designer, Developer, Project Manager and Project Coordinator roles.
How many working hours should be Billable?
Different Billable Roles have different capacities and expectations on how many Billable Hours are scheduled and delivered, normally all Billable roles have 6 Billable hours available for a full working day or 3 Billable Hours available for a half working day. All of the Billable hours are shown in Forecast.
Billable Hours percentage of each Billable Role
The table below indicates the Billable Hours percentage of each Billable Role and non Billable Role on a normal full working day. It also suggests the ideal percentage of how many hours should be Billable (doing work which we can bill our clients for) out of the normal working hours.
| Developer | Ideal: 80%, 6 out of 7.5 hours for a full working day. If your schedule is not full, we encourage you to take the initiative and do get in touch with your project manager and Nicole at your earliest. If client project meetings are arranged during this time, this is still billable work for clients. If you are brought along to sales meetings, the hours spent on these sales meetings are non billable. Please log them under admin>Sales. It is important that you prioritise the scheduled billable tasks over your other tasks. If you have difficulties with priorities/complete your tasks, please raise this in the resourcing channel, there is always help and support from the team if needed. |
| Designer | Ideal: 80%, 6 out of 7.5 hours for a full working day. If your schedule is not full, we encourage you to take the initiative and do get in touch with your project manager and Nicole at your earliest. If client project meetings are arranged during this time, this is still billable work for clients. If you are brought along to sales meetings, the hours spent on these sales meetings are non billable. Please log them under admin>Sales. It is important that you prioritise the scheduled billable tasks over your other tasks. If you have difficulties with priorities/complete your tasks, please raise this in the resourcing channel, there is always help and support from the team if needed. |
| Project Manager | Ideal: 60%, 4.5 out of 7.5 hours. All project managers are suggested to keep their schedule in forecast up to date and plan possible 3 weeks in advance. If client meetings are arranged during this time, this is still billable work for clients. If sales meetings are scheduled and there are other internal meetings on the day, please prioritize your billable tasks if possible, there is always help and support from the team if needed. |
| Project Coordinator | Ideal: 40%, 3 out of 7.5 hours. This roll is a mixture of Billable and Non Billable hours. Billable tasks should always be prioritised where possible. If your schedule is not full, we encourage you to get in touch with your manager at your earliest. |
| Director | 0 out of 7.5 hours. There are no Billable Hours in director’s or Account Manager’s schedule |
| Account Manager | 0 out of 7.5 hours. There are no Billable Hours in AM’s schedule as this is a purely sales focussed role. |
| HR/L&D/Finance | 0 out of 7.5 hours. There are no Billable Hours in HR/L&D/Finance schedule as this is a purely people and office management focussed role. |
Where and how do I record my Billable Hours
During a standard project process (this can vary depending on the type of project)
| Discovery | All hours after the quote is accepted are billable hours. Anything before this would be logged under sales. All hours once the quote is approved fall under discovery hours as you are discovering what the client is about, what their project is about etc. If the client is arranging calls to rethink the scope of work, and this involves an AM, those AM hours are unbillable but PM hours are still billable under Project management. Designer / developer joining the call will also log their hours under billable hours -consultancy for that phase |
| Wireframing | Wireframing – This is for the designer to log time on the wireframe only Wireframing – Consultancy – This is for the designer to log time such as calls with clients or discussing feedback on wireframing Wireframing – Project Management – This is for the PM to log time discussing the wireframes with the designer |
| Design | Design – This is for the designer to log time on the designs only Design- Consultancy – This is for the designer to log time such as calls with clients or discussing feedback on designs Design – Project Management – This is for the PM to log time discussing the wireframes with the designer |
| Development | Development – This is for the developer to log time when coding Development – Consultancy – This is for the developer to log time such as calls with clients or reviewing designs/wireframes Development – Project Management – This is for the PM to log time discussing dev work with the developer |
| Project Management Admin Time | This PM time is used for general PM time such as setting up projects in our internal tools, providing the client with budget updates, or general check in calls with the client. |
| QA (PM) | This is billable time and should be used by the PM only. Developers should log their QA time as part of their development work. |
| Launch | This is billable time used by the Developer when launching the site |
| Warranty | We have a 30 day warranty period after launching a site. If this is not a change request, but rather a bug that wasn’t picked up during QA, we will fix this for free. This is a billable item but time must be logged under the project. |
During a standard Support Project
Please make sure to include succinct, professional and detailed notes when logging support work (if the time is not directly logged from the Basecamp task). This helps Nicole or the relevant Project Manager to understand what you have been working on and if this should be billable/non-billable. We are also working on implementing a public support portal and therefore the details you log will be seen by our clients.
This also prevents the client from querying our report at the end of the month if notes are missing.
| Development | Development – This is for the developer to log time when coding and communicating with the client. |
| Design | Design – This is for the designer to log time when designing and communicating with the client. |
| Project Management | This PM time is used for general PM time such as communicating with the client or with internal team members regarding support tasks. |
| QA | This is billable time and it is mainly used by the Project Manager to review the support work. |
| Scoping for new work | Non-Billable – this can be used to log time for existing clients when generating new quotes. We should limit our develop/design investigation for small pieces of work to no longer than 20 minutes. If we do need longer, make sure to let the Project Manager know and we can include this in the final quote. |
| Account Management | This is to be used for account related issues, please make sure it differs from the Project Management, you can find more details in the Easy to Confuse categories. |
Where and how do I record my Non Billable Hours
It is important that you stay accountable and manage your own admin time, so you can utilise your hours to deliver exceptional Billable work. We value and trust everyone to take ownership of managing their own time. It is important that we are all aware that client work should always come first and it is your responsibility to reschedule internal meetings, if these will have a negative impact on completing billable tasks in a timely manner.
Note: If you’re working on internal design and development projects (e.g. Wholegrain website or Granola), this may be scheduled in Forecast within your billable time allocation.
Non Billable Hours categories
Here’s a list of the most common categories you will use:
| Wholegrain Admin | Internal comms (Slack / Emails / Basecamp) Internal calls Run Sheet Tuesday Team call Updating Forecast Handover Resourcing Reporting Morning PM call Updating Harvest Internal Updates (such as wholegrain maintenance) Technical Strategy Utilisation (for Nicole to run reports) Scheduling Maintenance |
| Wholegrain Sales | Proposals Meetings/ Calls Brief scoping (new client) Emails / basecamp messages Code review Account Management Research and Investigation |
| Team Coach | Coaching 1-1 Admin Internal training (prep) Internal training (delivery) Group Facilitation Reviewing questions/resources (for the team to log hours) |
Wholegrain Internal Training | Dev training Admin Training Design Training Project Management Training Shadowing Internal training via call Account Management Blog posts Systems / tools |
| Wholegrain HR | Admin Recruitment Onboarding/Offboarding Check ins The Granary Meetings/Calls Training Team Newsletter Contracts Payroll Account Management Employee Engagement |
| Office Management | Admin Equipment |
| Marketing | Admin Account management Blog Posts Business Development Social Media Partnerships Client Newsletter |
| Granola | Development Design Strategy Meeting/ calls |
Wholegrain Website | Development Design Project Management Content Entry QA Research New Features Account Management Information Architecture Fixes |
Easy to confuse categories:
Account management vs project management – Generally, no team members other than Account Managers should be using the account management category unless approved as this is non billable.
Client related calls vs internal meetings and calls – Wholegrain admin should only be used for internal calls when this is not related to client work or during the project cycle. This one sounds obvious but it does happen occasionally. Please use the consultancy category on the project for client related calls.
Support vs Maintenance – sometimes it can be confusing to know if client support requests should be logged under maintenance or support. As a rule, the maintenance project should only be used for the monthly plugin updates, reporting to clients, security updates, investigating downtime or hosting liaison.
It is also important to note that any bug fixes that are introduced by the client or by 3rd parties are not within the maintenance plan and therefore should be logged under support.
This document is most definitely still a work-in-progress, so do let us know if you can think of anything useful to add.
If you are still unsure of anything though, you can always speak to our Project Coordinator!