A client account loses money when the hours nobody counts, like calls, revisions, emails, and admin, are bigger than the hours you charge for. The account looks busy and feels important. Divide the money by all the hours, not just the billed ones, and the real number shows up.
The account everyone talks about
Acme is your biggest client. Three people work on it. The Slack channel never stops. Everyone feels good about Acme because Acme is busy.
At the end of the quarter, the owner does the math. Acme paid $30,000. The team spent 900 hours on it. That is $33 an hour. Your target rate is $90. Acme, the busy account, is the one losing money.
Where the hours hide
You quoted the project at 300 hours. The project took 300 hours. So where did the other 600 go?
- Calls and meetings. The weekly check-in. The "quick sync." The kickoff that ran long. Easily 100 hours a quarter on a big account.
- Revisions. Round two, round three, round four. The client "just had a thought." Another 150 hours.
- Email and messages. Reading, replying, chasing approvals. Nobody tracks this, and it is often 10 to 20% of everything.
- Admin. Invoices, reports, filing, status updates. Another 50.
- Scope creep. The small extras that were never quoted. "While you're in there, can you also…"
None of these are the project. All of them are the account.
Do the math once
You need two numbers for the account over a period, say a quarter.
- Money received (or billed, but pick one and stay consistent).
- All hours. Delivery, calls, revisions, email, admin, extras. Everything anyone did for that client.
Divide. That is your effective hourly rate for the account. Compare it with the rate you think you charge. The effective hourly rate calculator does this and shows the hours by category, so you can see which bucket is eating the margin.
Example
| Hours | |
|---|---|
| Quoted delivery work | 300 |
| Calls and meetings | 110 |
| Revisions beyond round one | 160 |
| Email and chasing | 120 |
| Admin and reporting | 60 |
| Unquoted extras | 150 |
| Total | 900 |
$30,000 ÷ 900 = $33 per hour. If you only count the 300 quoted hours, it looks like $100 an hour. The difference is the whole problem.
What to do about it
Once you see the buckets, the fixes are obvious.
- Revisions: agree the number of rounds in the scope, and make the brief clearer so round one lands. Here is how.
- Calls: replace the weekly call with a written update, and keep calls for decisions.
- Extras: write a change request every time. Even a small one. Template.
- Email: batch it. One reply a day beats twenty.
- Price: if the account is still under your rate after all that, the price is wrong. When to raise a retainer.
Why nobody catches this
Because nobody tracks the hidden hours. Delivery work gets logged against the project. Calls, emails, and revisions get logged against nothing, or against "general." The account looks fine in every report, and the owner finds out at the end of the year.
Where M-Tracker fits
In M-Tracker, every task sits in a project, and the timer records time against it, including the calls, the revisions, and the emails, if you make them tasks. Meetings from Google Calendar are counted separately. The project view shows all the hours against the project, and the margins view shows what the account is really earning per hour. You find out in week three, not at year end. And because finished work is checked against its brief before it is handed over, there are fewer revision rounds to hide the margin in.
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