Glossary
Time billing & agency finance glossary
Plain-English definitions of the terms agencies, consultants and bookkeepers use to measure, price and bill their time.
- Billable Hours
- Billable hours are the hours of work you can charge a client for, as opposed to internal time spent on admin, sales or training. They are the raw material of every services invoice, priced by a rate and grouped into invoice lines.
- Blended Rate
- A blended rate is a single hourly rate that combines the different rates of the people on a project into one weighted average, so you can quote one number instead of a separate price for every seniority level.
- Email Ticketing
- Email ticketing turns incoming email into tracked items of work with an owner, a state and a history. The client keeps writing ordinary email; the team gets a queue instead of a pile.
- Realization Rate
- Realization rate is the percentage of your billable value that you invoice. It compares what you billed against what you could have billed, exposing how much potential revenue is lost to write-downs and discounts.
- Retainer Billing
- Retainer billing is an arrangement where a client pays a fixed recurring fee for an agreed block of work or hours each period. Logged time draws down against that block, and the gap between agreed and used hours reveals over or under-servicing.
- Shared Inbox
- A shared inbox is a single mailbox several people work in together, where each conversation carries an owner and a state. It replaces forwarding and CC as the way a team handles incoming requests.
- Utilization Rate
- Utilization rate is the share of a person's available working time that is spent on billable work. It is expressed as a percentage and shows how much of paid capacity is being sold to clients.
- Write-Downs
- A write-down is a deliberate reduction of the time billed to a client below the time recorded, often because a task ran over budget. It lowers realisation without erasing the original record of work done.