Manage clients, engagements and profitability.

The work reserve

Last Friday of the month, the question lands: “how much do we still have to invoice?”. In many services businesses the answer is pieced together from spreadsheets, memory and instinct — and it arrives too late to change anything.

The work reserve answers it instead. It is the order book expressed in billable hours: open engagements, hours sold but not yet delivered, fixed prices already started, support contracts under way. By customer, by engagement and by employee, you know how many weeks of sold work lie ahead — and whether the team is already full or the outstanding proposals need chasing.

On the other side, every hour recorded carries its nature: billable or not. Travel, internal meetings, pre-sales, training, warranty and rework, absences — all of it is visible. The non-productive rate reads by employee, by team and by month. This is not about watching anyone: it simply explains the gap between hours paid for and hours sold, and it is the one lever that really moves the result.

Then comes invoicing, and this is where the time is won. Support contracts — subscriptions, hour packages, tickets, maintenance — are billed in a single periodic run, with what has been consumed and what is still due.

Time-and-materials hours follow the same path: every service recorded in the period comes up, grouped by customer and engagement, ready to invoice. You check, exclude what needs excluding, and generate the invoices in one move. What used to take days now fits into a morning.

Above all, nothing is lost along the way. A forgotten hour is never recovered: it is margin that leaves without a sound.

“This time, the answer fits in a single figure.”