If you’re in a consulting organization, it’s important to know how many hours each employee works. It’s also important to know if those hours are billable or non-billable. You can likely paying employees whether they are bringing in billable hours or not. So it’s important to maximize billable hours, if you can.
Let’s show a few extreme examples to illustrate the point.
Example #1: Pay period of 168 hours. And only one billable hour. Billing rate $100.
That is only 0.6% utilization, and an effective billing rate of $0.60 per scheduled hour. You can’t live on sixty cents an hour. 🙂
Example: 2 Pay period of 168 hours. All 168 are billable. Billing rate $100.
That is 100% utilization (which is nearly impossible), and an effective billing rate of $100 per scheduled hour. Pretty nice! But also pretty unrealistic.