Understanding Employee Utilisation Rates with Time On It

What utilisation rate means — and why it matters

Utilisation rate measures how much of an employee's working time is spent on billable client work. The formula is simple: billable hours divided by total hours worked, expressed as a percentage. A consultant who billed 32 hours in a 40-hour week has an 80% utilisation rate.

For professional services businesses — agencies, consultancies, IT firms — utilisation is one of the most direct indicators of profitability. Low utilisation means capacity sitting idle. High utilisation means the team is at or near full billing capacity. Both extremes have implications: too low and revenue is being left on the table; too high for too long and burnout follows.

The challenge is that calculating utilisation requires knowing two things — billable hours and total hours — and most teams don't have an easy way to see both at once.

Where the hours data comes from

If your team logs time in QuickBooks Online, the data is already there. Every time entry has a billable flag: yes or no. Total hours is the sum of all entries for an employee in a period; billable hours is the subset where that flag is set to yes.

Time On It syncs this data from QBO and surfaces it in Team Insights. When you open Team Insights and select a date range, you see every employee's hours for that period — ranked from highest to lowest. Switching the view between monthly, weekly, and daily lets you spot patterns: which months have strong utilisation, which weeks are light, which days show no entries at all.

Drilling into an individual employee

Team-level totals tell you who worked the most hours. They don't tell you what that time went on. Clicking any employee in Team Insights opens Employee Insights — a personal breakdown that shows:

• Hours by customer — which clients got the most of this person's time
• Hours by service item — what type of work they were doing (development, consulting, project management)
• Hours by work type tag — if your team uses square-bracket tags in descriptions, these appear here too

For utilisation analysis, the customer breakdown is particularly useful. If an employee has 150 total hours and 120 of them are on client accounts, you can immediately see their effective billable rate. If 30 hours are on "Internal" or similar non-billable customers, that's your non-billable portion.

Using work type tags to go deeper

Billable versus non-billable is a useful first-order split. But for many teams it's not enough. Consider a software team where every hour is technically billable to a client — but some of that time is planned feature work, some is reactive bug fixing, and some is meetings and admin. Billing the same rate for all three doesn't mean they're equally valuable or sustainable.

Time On It supports square-bracket tags in timesheet descriptions. When your team prefixes a description with [Feature], [Support], or [Advisory], the app picks this up automatically when syncing. The by-tag breakdown in Employee Insights then shows how an employee's time splits across those categories — without changing how they log time in QBO or how invoices are generated.

For utilisation reviews, this makes it possible to distinguish planned work from reactive work, or client-facing time from internal investment. A team member spending 40% of their time on unplanned support calls looks different from one spending 40% on strategic consulting, even if both have the same headline utilisation rate.

Running a monthly utilisation review

A simple workflow for monthly utilisation tracking with Time On It:

1. Sync the previous month's time data from QBO via the QuickBooks Data page.
2. Open Team Insights, set the period to Last Month.
3. Review total hours per employee — anyone significantly below expectation warrants a look.
4. Click through to Employee Insights for each person and check their customer breakdown. Is the low-hours person on leave? On an internal project? Or genuinely underutilised?
5. Check the by-tag breakdown if you use tags. High reactive support versus planned delivery can indicate a capacity or scope issue on a particular client.

This process takes ten minutes and gives you a clear view of where the team's time went — before the month recedes into memory and the data becomes historical noise.