Unbilled Client Email Calculator

Any time your team spends reading and answering client messages that never reaches a timesheet and therefore never reaches an invoice. It is one of the largest and least visible sources of write-off in agencies and consultancies, because unlike project work it arrives in small pieces that individually feel too short to log.

For client-facing staff at an agency, somewhere between three and eight hours a week is the range teams usually report once they count reading requests properly, writing considered replies, and the back and forth that follows. Account managers and anyone owning a retainer relationship usually sit at the higher end. The honest answer is to measure your own, which is what this calculator is for; the figure surprises people because no single message feels significant.

In teams without an inbox connected to their time tracker, most of it never gets logged: teams describing their own weeks commonly put the recorded share under a quarter, and plenty put it nearer a tenth. The reason is mechanical rather than cultural: logging twelve minutes means opening a second application, finding the right client, and describing the work, which costs almost as long as the task itself.

Three reasons. The tasks are short, so the friction of logging them is proportionally huge. They arrive in someone's personal mailbox, away from any project context. And nobody has decided in advance whether the request is inside the retainer or extra, so the safest thing is to answer it and move on. None of that is laziness, it is the shape of the work.

Almost always, yes. If a client asks a question about their project and someone qualified spends half an hour answering it, that is professional time and it either comes out of a retainer or goes on an invoice. Whether you choose to charge for it is a commercial decision, but you cannot make that decision if you never knew the time existed.

Not necessarily, and plenty of agencies deliberately absorb short queries as relationship maintenance. The point of measuring it is that absorbing cost should be a choice you make with the number in front of you, not something that happens to you. Once you can see it, you can decide to bill it, cap it, or price it into the retainer.

Directly and expensively. If a retainer was scoped at forty hours of delivery but actually consumes another six hours a month of correspondence, the effective rate on that client is a quarter lower than you think. Because the correspondence was never recorded, next year's renewal gets priced off the same wrong number, and the error compounds.

Use what an average hour of your client-facing team bills at, not your top rate and not your cost. For most small agencies that lands somewhere between 90 and 180 in local currency. If you are unsure, our blended rate calculator works it out from your individual rates and hours.

The only durable fix is removing the friction, because asking people to be more disciplined about logging twelve-minute tasks does not survive a busy week. That means the inbox and the timer being the same surface, so logging is one click from the conversation with the client already attached rather than a separate act of data entry.

Yes, for two reasons beyond billing. Requests stop stalling in one person's mailbox when they are away, and you get a real measurement of what each client costs to serve. That second one changes which clients you keep and what you charge them, whether or not the hours ever appear on an invoice.

No signup, and nothing is stored on a server. Everything runs in your browser, and the copy link button encodes your inputs into a shareable URL so you can send the result to a partner or your finance person. It is free to use as often as you like.