Every creative agency should be committed to their clients. Committed to providing their clients with the best creative work they can produce. Committed to creatively solving business problems in a visual manner. Committed to giving the client the best expertise and value for their money. But, sometimes clients are neglected, their projects pushed to the back burner by a more interesting project, or a client delay.
Using online time tracking software can help a creative agency identify which client commitments are in danger of being dropped before it happens. In this article, we’ll be using the Mr. Pie Chart report from Intervals, our online time tracking software. The pie chart pictured below is ideal for comparing how much time you are billing different clients.
As we can see, more than half of our billable time is being tracked against the orange and light blue clients. The question to ask ourselves is, what about the clients represented by the smaller slivers? This chart is showing us that the mauve and sage green clients are not being billed as much.
Once we know which clients are being billed less, we can look into they why. Perhaps they’ve been delayed by the client, so there isn’t any work to do this week. Or, perhaps our team is stretched too thin and hasn’t been able to work on this client’s projects.
The time tracking data as rendered by the pie chart tells us our client commitments are slipping. The chart may not tell us why, but it does tell us where to look. Generating another report or two is all it should require to start a conversation with the client and/or the team to find out why the billable hours are lessening and to resolve any workflow issues that may be contributing to the decline.
