July 07, 2023 • News
The debate about timesheets often misses the point. The agencies struggling with time tracking aren't suffering because timesheets exist , they're struggling because the data rarely goes anywhere useful.
Ask anyone at a creative agency what they think of timesheets and you'll get the same response: a groan, an eye-roll, or a story about a Friday afternoon nagging Slack message that nobody responded to.
The frustration is real, but the debate that has grown up around it. "Are timesheets dead?" - is asking the wrong question.
Because the problem was never the timesheet. The problem is what happens to the data after it's been collected. Or more accurately, what doesn't happen to it.
The critics have a point. David Trott, one of advertising's most respected voices, put it bluntly: if a creative spends three days on a problem and can't find a great answer, do the timesheets reflect three days of billable thinking, or three days of failure? The question is uncomfortable because it exposes a real tension: time isn't always a fair measure of creative value.
Value pricing has grown in popularity as a response to this. Instead of billing by the hour, agencies charge based on the outcomes they deliver and the expertise they bring. In theory, it's cleaner. In practice, it still requires you to know your costs.
And here's where the anti-timesheet argument falls down.
You cannot price on value if you don't know what it costs to produce the work. You cannot protect your margin if you can't see when a job is going over budget. You cannot build a financially healthy agency on instinct and good intentions alone. As an agency leader, you've probably experienced the painful moment at month-end when the numbers don't reflect what felt like a busy, productive month. The agency looks full. The team is working hard. But the profit isn't there.
That gap between activity and financial reality is almost always a data problem.
For most agencies, timesheets sit in one system, project budgets live in another, and finance does its own thing in a spreadsheet or accounting package that barely speaks to either. The result is that the data is captured but never connected.
This creates pain that's felt differently depending on where you sit in the agency:
If you're a founder or agency leader, you're making commercial decisions based on gut feel rather than real numbers. Everyone seems busy. The agency is billing well. But cash is always tight and you can't quite work out where the margin is going. By the time you realise a job has gone over budget, it's already too late to do anything about it.
If you run operations, you spend more time chasing data than improving the way the agency works. You can't give leadership an accurate utilisation figure because the information is spread across systems that don't agree with each other. Everyone says they're busy, but you can't tell how much of that time is actually billable.
If you're in client services, you're doing a manual reconciliation every week - exporting timesheets, pulling budgets, building a picture in a spreadsheet that's out of date the moment you finish it. Over-servicing is invisible until a job is finished, by which point the margin is already gone.
The timesheet isn't the problem. The disconnection is.
When time data flows directly into job management, and job management connects to billing and finance, something changes. You stop looking backwards and start seeing what's happening right now.
Real-time visibility of time against budget means you can course-correct before margin is lost, not after. A client services director who can see at a glance that a job is running 20% over hours can have a conversation with the client or the team today, not at month-end when the damage is done.
For operations leaders, connected time data answers the questions that matter: how much of our team's time is genuinely billable? Where are we under-resourced? Which clients take up disproportionate time relative to what they pay? This is the kind of insight that lets you resource proactively and make smarter decisions, rather than reacting to crises that could have been seen coming.
This is where resource planning comes into its own. Time tracking data that feeds directly into resource scheduling means you can see in real time where capacity is tight, where skills are being stretched across too many jobs, and where you have room to take on more work. Without that connection, resource planning is guesswork dressed up as a spreadsheet.
For founders, it means the P&L finally reflects reality. No more Sunday evening spreadsheet sessions. No more surprises at month-end. A clear, connected view of where the agency is making and losing money at any given point.
The answer to the timesheets debate isn't all or nothing. Many agencies are moving towards models that combine value pricing for certain clients with time tracking for internal costing and performance analysis. This is a sensible approach. You can price on value and still track time - not to charge by the hour, but to understand your true cost of delivery, benchmark your estimates against actuals, and build smarter quotes for future work.
But this hybrid model only works if your systems make it easy, not harder. If time tracking requires your team to log into a separate tool and manually export data into a spreadsheet for the finance team to then reconcile, you've created more admin than you've solved. The creative team stops filling timesheets in. The data becomes unreliable. The debate restarts.
The goal isn't more timesheets. It's connected data.
The agencies that are making timesheets work aren't the ones with the strictest policies or the most persistent Friday reminders. They're the ones where time tracking is simple, connected, and immediately useful - where the data flows directly into job costing, resource planning, and financial reporting without anyone having to chase it or clean it up.
When that's in place, time tracking stops feeling like admin and starts feeling like information. And information is what separates agencies that run on gut feel from agencies that run on clarity.
The question was never "are timesheets dead?". The question is: what are you doing with the data?
Paprika connects time tracking, job management, resource planning and finance in a single platform, so the data you're already collecting starts working harder for your agency.
Book a demo to see how it works in practice.
