About this site
Fifty notes on utilisation and billable efficiency, written for the people who have to produce the figure and then live with it: practice and resource managers, finance and operations in professional services, anybody whose week is recorded against client codes, and whoever maintains the query the number actually comes out of.
What it covers
What the ratio measures and what it is evidence of. The numerator and the denominator, item by item, and the six denominators in common use. What happens the day the figure acquires a threshold, and how fast it can honestly improve. What the number does when it is put against one person's name. The eight things people do when it matters. What the ratio cannot see — realisation, yield, quality, the unbilled work that wins the next engagement. And the four figures that make it usable.
What it leaves out
Capacity planning and demand forecasting as subjects in their own right. Both are separate problems with their own literature, and neither is solved by a better ratio.
Time recording systems, employment law and tax treatment. How time may be recorded, what may be billed, what a performance measure may be used for and what obligations any of it creates differ by jurisdiction, by sector, by framework and by agreement, and they change. Those are questions for somebody qualified where you are.
About the figures
Every number on this site is an illustration of what one firm recorded for itself, and is labelled as such. None of them is a benchmark, a survey result or a statement of what any method requires. Currency figures are in pounds because they come from one firm's own records; nothing turns on the currency.