Yes and yes. I always struggled with this and keeping my attention can be difficult. I primarily work for myself now, so billable time is much easier for me now versus when I worked for the “Firm.” I don’t work, I don’t bill and I do not make any money.
This was a different story when I worked for the Firm. There were billable hour goals, budgets and then the perception of what is actually going on. Spending time in the office for some people meant that they were billing despite the fact they spent a significant amount of time talking, having coffee and diligently searching for the end of the internet.
At the Firm, once you advance into the senior accountant role, typically this means you have to take ownership of the budget and ultimately billing the customer. This was my first rodeo experience and dealing 1on1 with a billing accountant or actual internal accounting (not necessarily positive for me).
I knew my billing rate, salary and what was getting billed to the client and never really understood the value provided to the client. When I first started out, didn’t think that my effort that was important enough to justify the large billing rates and then you factor in the chatting, coffee breaks and any other distractions. All-in, I would estimate that I only actually billed 75% of my time. I only wanted to bill for the actual time I was working on the client(s) and frankly that was difficult to do. I didn’t want the client to pay for the time I was not physically working on the client.
In retrospect, I think this was good and bad. Good in that I was doing the right thing in my mind and this made me focus harder. I hated when I worked on a project for a long time only to realize that there was an error that I made and then again I didn’t feel that I could bill the time. Bad in that this was my job and chosen profession, my job was to get a client finished and regardless of the amount of time it took to do it. The audit & tax engagements were fixed price. It was at the risk of the Firm to bid the jobs to win the work in a profitable fashion. I was in effect taking some of this risk because the client wasn’t receiving value from my vantage point.
Net, net, bill all of your time when you work for a firm. I still bill the same conservative way, I would never want a client to hesitate to call me thinking I would bill them for the call. My sole job is to provide value-add advice for a reasonable fee and I have been successful with this thought pattern.