Time leakage calculator
Time recorded hours or days after the work is done is time that goes missing. Estimate what late recording is costing your firm, and what recording as you work could be worth.
Watch how it works 30-second video and step-by-step guide
- Enter your number of fee earners, average charge-out rate and chargeable hours recorded per fee earner per week.
- Enter working weeks per year and realisation: the share of recorded time that is billed and paid.
- Choose when most fee earners record their time today. This sets the assumed share of work never recorded, which you can change.
- Adjust the assumed share lost with contemporaneous recording if you wish. Both figures are assumptions, not research.
- Read the result: the fees your firm could recover each year, the hours behind it, and the minutes per fee earner per day.
- Change any figure and the result updates instantly. Print or save it if you want to keep it.
About this tool
The time leakage calculator estimates how much chargeable work goes unrecorded when time is entered late, and what recording time as the work happens could be worth to your firm.
Why time goes missing
When time is recorded at the end of the day, the next day or the end of the week, short tasks are forgotten: calls, emails, quick reviews, interruptions. Each one is small, but across a team and a year they add up to a significant share of the work actually done. Recording as you work, contemporaneously, captures most of it.
Who it is for
Partners, practice managers and finance teams who want to understand the value of better time recording, and make the case for timers, mobile time capture or a change of habit.
What you enter
- Number of fee earners, average charge-out rate and chargeable hours recorded each week.
- Working weeks per year and realisation: the share of recorded time that is billed and paid.
- When most fee earners record their time, which sets an assumed share of work that is never recorded. You can change that assumption.
Assumptions, not research
The loss percentages are assumptions you control, not research figures. Published estimates vary widely and mostly come from software vendors, so use figures that reflect your own firm. The working is shown on the page. Your figures stay in your browser and are not sent to us.
Closing the gap
Most practice management systems already include timers, mobile time capture and reminders that firms never switch on. We help firms configure them, train fee earners to use them, and report on recording habits so the improvement lasts.