Second Wind - BE a Better Agency

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Periodically, we speak with agency owners and managers who are struggling with the issue of time tracking. Many agencies still bill by employee hours, but the trend has been shifting steadily toward an estimate-based process. Pricing on what you know to be typical of certain project types rather than on actual hours logged. Call it experience estimating. The question is whether time sheets still earn their keep. The answer, as with most things in agency management, depends on where your agency actually is. The case for keeping time sheets Time tracking does something no estimate can do on its own: it tells you whether your estimates are accurate. If jobs consistently run over budget, the data will show it. That gives you something to act on. You can approach the client, document scope changes, and adjust the estimate accordingly. Without time tracking, you are flying blind on whether the agency is actually making money on any given job. There is also a margin reality worth remembering. The gap between what you pay a designer hourly and what you bill the client is significant. A designer has to genuinely blow past the estimate before the agency starts losing money on a job. Time tracking surfaces that before it becomes a problem. For agencies taking on new project types, time data is particularly valuable. You may not need to track obsessively once a project type becomes familiar, but the first several times through, that data builds the foundation for accurate future estimates. Scope changes mid-project are another trigger. When a client alters direction, tracking resumes so overages can be documented and billed. The broader point: you can always decide how much to bill or write off if you end up over budget. You cannot make that call intelligently without knowing what actually happened. When no time sheets makes sense Agencies who have successfully converted to a no-time-sheets culture have a few things in common. Management is less concerned with employees logging hours than with accomplishing assigned tasks at a high level of quality. If your culture is driven by micro-managing every moment of the day, or if leadership is uncomfortable with employees using their own judgment about how many hours is too many, abandoning time sheets may not work for you. If the agency's leaders are not committed to the model, no process will work efficiently. Production has a good-to-excellent track record for tight estimating and solid internal time management. If your creative and production people reliably bring projects in on time and on budget, and your estimators know how to build in enough range to give the agency some room, you can do fine without daily time sheets. If your estimating is inconsistent and you routinely need to adjust final bills, it is too soon to stop tracking. Fix the estimating first. Your clients perceive you as a strategic partner and willingly pay your flat invoices because they reflect your value, not your cost. If you are a vendor in the eyes of your clients, you will probably be tracking time for the foreseeable future. Strategic partners have more leeway. Accountability is built into your proposals and processes, and clients trust you to estimate accurately and deliver consistently. Your team focuses on what each person contributes rather than how many hours they log. If your people get along well, support each other, and are genuinely engaged in the work, removing time sheets can give the culture more freedom to be creative and collaborative. Time sheets make some employees very conscious of others' long lunches, late arrivals, and early departures. That friction is real and it costs something. There is also the simple reality that time sheets create a punching-the-clock mentality that runs counter to how most creative people think about their work. Most agency staff today operate with an always-on mentality, integrating work across hours and devices in ways that don't map neatly onto quarter-hour increments. Removing time sheets reduces administrative load and daily friction, which can make the agency a better place to work. The bottom line Understand how your agency culture actually works, and whether you have the right people and processes in place, before attempting to move away from time tracking. In the end, the devotion to the clock may be a matter of operational maturity more than necessity. The agencies that drop time sheets successfully have usually earned the right to do so.

Are Time Sheets Passé?

Second Wind

12/13/2025

Periodically, we speak with agency owners and managers who are struggling with the issue of time tracking. Many agencies still bill by employee hours, but the trend has been shifting ...

Take Me Out to the Ballpark: An Estimating System That Works

Second Wind

8/20/2025

"Harry, I need a brochure done quickly. How much do you think it will cost? Just give me a ballpark figure."

Those words have cost agencies a lot of money ...

Strategic Agency or Vendor: Which Sort Are You?

Deborah Budd

2/2/2023

Now and then, I see an agency question on the Second Wind Forums that gives me pause. For instance, one agency asked for help assembling “average creative prices” for her ...

Evolving a More Agile Workflow