It's little wonder that in many accounting firms, time and billing is still one of the most critical applications, as well as the one most likely to be neglected. The reasons for this importance are underscored by the name of the application itself. While you might argue that it's the expertise of your staff and the product that you sell, the actuality is that what the client pays for is the time your staff spends on their behalf. Value billing is a great concept, but even after all these years of trying to move clients over to this method of billing, many clients still want to see how much effort, in the form of time, is being spent on their account.
Regardless of the rates and service levels that your staff provides to your clients, one great truism prevails - time is a non-renewable resource. Once it's spent or wasted, there's no getting it back.
That makes time a precious commodity and resource, one well worth using wisely. The time component of time and billing is designed to do that. By keeping track of the time spent on practice matters, you can make sure that not only will you bill for every precious minute and second, but you will also (hopefully) be able to see where time is wasted or spent poorly.
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The second component of the application, billing, is also important. Unless you're in a nonprofit that is using a T&B system to track time and expenses for grant purposes, it's likely that you're in business to make money. Getting paid for the services provided to clients is important, especially if you want to be able to pay salaries, rent and other expenses.
Except for retainers, fees for accounting and consulting services are rarely prepaid. In fact, one of the more common complaints is that clients are often slow to pay even when promptly billed. Many accounting practices are so busy trying to serve clients that they often let billing slide. Common sense should tell you that if you can't be bothered to get a bill out quickly, why should the client be in any greater hurry to pay it when it finally shows up?
And clients are notorious for going over bills from their accountants item by item. Making an error on a bill is often a disastrous mistake. After all, if you can screw up your own billings, is your work for the client any more accurate? Once you've lost a client's confidence, you've lost that client.
ONE SIZE FITS ALL ... POORLY
Selecting a T&B application is probably just a bit more difficult than it might seem at first. All vendors include many of the same features, but how they are implemented, and what non-generic features are included, can mean the difference between a successful installation and a waste of time and money.
One area to be especially aware of is how staff members interact with the system. There is a general trend with T&B for staff to be very resistant to using the application. That's completely natural - no one likes to feel like the boss is looking over their shoulder and counting the minutes that they are in the bathroom. How you explain the system to your staff is important, but regardless of how much you assure your employees that the new application isn't meant to keep an eye on them, they are going to resent and resist using it. By choosing an application that's easy to use, and works well with the procedures already in place in your practice, you may be able to reduce this reluctance somewhat.
