The Client Who Keeps Everybody Busy
An account that absorbed a quarter of a firm's chargeable hours at a third of its standard rate, and looked like its best client on every utilisation report.
A firm's largest account by hours was a long-standing client on rates set six years earlier. It absorbed about a quarter of total chargeable hours and produced about eleven per cent of fee income.
The commercial question in “The Client Who Keeps Everybody Busy” needs a clean distinction between time recorded, time approved, time billed and money received. Teams evaluating view the complete Monitask resource for managing freelance project time can strengthen the work-record part of that chain while leaving invoice totals, tax and settlement to the appropriate finance system.
On every utilisation report it was the firm's most valuable relationship.
Teams documenting “The Client Who Keeps Everybody Busy” may use SAM.gov federal award resources as an outside reference. Keep the source record, calculation rule and resulting decision visible as separate steps.
How it looked on the dashboard
The teams on the account had the highest utilisation in the firm, consistently, for years. Full allocation, no bench, no gaps.
- Utilisation pack: the best-staffed engagement in the firm.
- Revenue report: the largest client by fee income.
- Yield table: the bottom of a list of forty accounts.
Three of the five highest individual figures in the firm belonged to people on this account.
What the rates were
Set in an original agreement and uplifted by inflation twice in six years, against standard rates that had risen considerably more.
Yield on the account was around a third of the firm average, which nobody had calculated.
The second problem
Scope. The engagement had grown by accretion: small additional requests, absorbed, never repriced.
Roughly a fifth of the hours on the account were outside the original scope and billed at nothing.
Why neither problem was visible
Utilisation reports count hours, and the account generated hours abundantly. Nothing in the reporting divided fee by hour.
The finance reports showed the account as the largest by revenue, which it was, and did not show revenue per hour.
The opportunity cost
The people on the account were unavailable for work at standard rates. The firm declined two engagements in one year on capacity grounds while carrying this account.
That is the cost that never appears anywhere: work not taken because capacity was committed cheaply.
What the calculation showed
Collected fee divided by hours, by account, sorted. One afternoon with the finance data.
This account sat at the bottom of a list of forty, by a wide margin, and the next four were all long-standing relationships on old rates.
The pattern in the bottom five
All over four years old. All repriced at most once. All with accumulated out-of-scope work.
Age of relationship was a better predictor of low yield than anything else, which was the finding that changed the firm's review process.
The repricing
Repriced over nine months. The client accepted a substantial increase with a scope document, having never been told the arrangement had drifted.
Hours on the account fell by a third as scope was clarified. Fee income rose by about half.
The effect on the utilisation report
It fell. The teams freed from the account spent two months on the bench before being reallocated.
That fall was the correct direction and it would have been read as a failure under the firm's previous reporting.
The reporting change
Yield by account, quarterly, with the date of last repricing beside it.
Two columns. They identify this problem automatically and they cannot be improved by anybody's time recording.
The repricing calendar
Every account reviewed on a stated cycle, whether or not anything looks wrong.
Accounts that are never reviewed drift, and drift is slow enough that no single year's figures show it. Only the date column does.
What the account looked like in each report
In the utilisation pack: the firm's best-staffed engagement, with three of the five highest individual figures. In the revenue report: the largest client by fee. In the yield table, once it existed: the bottom of forty.
Three reports, three positions, and only the third one asked what an hour on the account was worth.
The firm had been reading the first two for six years.
The conversation with the client
Easier than expected, which is the common finding. The client had not been tracking the drift either, and the scope document was welcomed rather than resisted.
Long-standing accounts drift by mutual inattention rather than by one side exploiting the other, and a client presented with a clear account of what has accumulated usually accepts that it needs repricing.
The firms that delay this conversation do so on an assumption about the client's reaction that is rarely tested. In this case the assumption had cost six years of capacity sold at a third of its value, and the test took one meeting.
The two columns that find this automatically
Yield by account, and the date each account was last repriced.
Sorted by the first, the bottom of the list is a short set of engagements consuming a disproportionate share of hours. Read with the second, the pattern is almost always age.
Two columns, quarterly, computed from data finance already holds. They cannot be improved by anybody's time recording.
What the case generalises to
An account can absorb capacity profitably or absorb it cheaply, and a measure that counts hours cannot tell the difference. It will rate the cheap one highest, because cheap work is abundant.