Ten-minute calls that never get written down
A client's operations manager rings at half eight because an employee has not turned up for the third day running. Your consultant talks it through, sends a template absence letter, and moves on. At lunch the same client emails about holiday carry-over. In the afternoon their MD phones about a difficult conversation with a sales manager. None of it goes on a timesheet because each piece felt too small to log.
Multiply that by forty retained clients and six consultants and you have a business that sells hours by the month but has no reliable idea how many it gives away. The monthly fee looked sensible when the retainer was agreed. Nobody can say whether it still is.
The real reason logging fails
It is tempting to blame consultants for not filling in timesheets. The truer cause is that time logging lives in a separate system from the work. Advice happens on the phone, in Outlook and in Teams. The timesheet is a spreadsheet or a practice tool opened at the end of the day, when half the calls are already forgotten.
There is a second cause. Retainer clients are often served by whoever picks up, so one client's time is spread across three consultants who each assume someone else is keeping count.
What the missing hours cost
| What goes unrecorded | What it leads to |
|---|---|
| Short advice calls | Heavy users look the same as light users at renewal |
| Email replies with attached templates | Document work given away inside the fee |
| Evening and weekend calls | Consultant overtime nobody can see or plan for |
| Work spread across consultants | No single view of what a client has received |
| Project work mixed into retainer time | Chargeable work never invoiced |
The damage shows up at renewal. You either hold the price on a client who is costing you money, or you raise it without evidence and the client pushes back. Meanwhile quieter clients may be paying for a service they barely use and could leave, because nobody has shown them what they received.
How we build retainer time capture
- We connect to your phone system (for example a cloud system such as RingCentral, 8x8 or Microsoft Teams Phone) and match incoming and outgoing numbers to the client they belong to.
- Emails sent from consultants' Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace mailboxes are matched to clients by domain, with a short prompt for anything ambiguous.
- Each matched call or thread becomes a draft time entry with duration, client and consultant already filled in. The consultant confirms or edits it with one click, and can add a short category such as absence, conduct or contracts.
- Entries flow into whatever you record time in today, whether that is a practice management tool, a timesheet in your CRM or a database we set up for you.
- A retainer dashboard shows used hours against allowance for every client, month by month, with a flag when a client passes the level you choose.
- A monthly usage summary can be generated per client, ready for the account manager to review before it goes anywhere.
The point is to remove typing, not to monitor people. Consultants stay in control of what is recorded, and anything personal is simply dismissed.
After it is running
Consultants stop reconstructing their day from memory. Directors can see, before a renewal conversation, which clients use their retainer heavily and which barely touch it, and what kind of help they ask for. Project work that crept into retainer time becomes visible, so it can be quoted separately. And when a client asks what they are paying for, you have a factual answer rather than a feeling.
Pricing decisions remain yours. The system gives you the numbers you need to make them.
Signs this is your consultancy
- Retainer fees were set years ago and never checked against usage.
- Consultants log time at the end of the week, if at all.
- You suspect a handful of clients take most of your advice time.
- Nobody can tell a client, in numbers, what they received last quarter.
- Renewal conversations rely on gut feel.