Within accountancy, everything revolves around time: available hours, hours worked and billable hours. With the right KPIs and a well-designed time tracking and scheduling software such as Fortes Milestones, you will gain insight into productivity, utilization and profitability.
The answers to the ten questions below will help you manage your office in the best possible way.
1. What is my total capacity?
The basis of any accounting firm is its available capacity, expressed in hours per employee per year.
If you include holidays, leave and a standard for sick leave, you are left with an average of about 1,800 productive hours per FTE. This forms the starting point for calculating capacity utilization and planning workloads.
2. How do I avoid idle time in my schedule?
Preventing planning gaps is key to profitability.
No employee works 100 percent billable, but by working with standards for idle and non-billible hours, you keep a grip on productivity. With Fortes Milestones, you can immediately see where capacity remains unused and make timely adjustments.
3. How much capacity is still available?
During busy periods, such as spring, utilization is often high. The challenge lies in monitoring the balance between workload and customer satisfaction.
If the workload drops in the second half of the year, the margin can quickly decline. By having continuous insight into available hours and planned capacity, you can avoid surprises and make early adjustments with sales or marketing actions.
4. What is the realized hourly rate?
Analyze the realized hourly rate per employee or per project and compare it with the budget.
With Fortes Milestones, you can see at a glance whether projects are profitable – even with fixed price agreements. This allows you to make timely adjustments and monitor margins.
5. How do I keep write-offs under control?
Even with enough billable hours, you can face write-offs. By having insight into deviations between time spent and agreed upon rates at the order level, you will discover where profits leak and where optimization is possible.
6. What is the turnover per employee?
Revenue per employee is a direct indicator of efficiency and competitiveness.
High revenue per employee may indicate smart processes or strong pricing. Use this KPI to benchmark and improve your organization.
7. How healthy is my office’s leverage?
The ratio of partners to employees – the leverage – determines how many billable hours are realized per partner.
The better this ratio, the higher the profit per partner. The balance between billable and non- billable functions also plays an important role in this.
8. How do I monitor sick leave effectively?
For accounting firms, which rely heavily on capacity hours, sick leave is a crucial KPI.
By distinguishing between regular leave and special leave (such as maternity leave), you get a clear picture. Structural monitoring also helps to recognize signals about workload and employee satisfaction in time.
9. How many non-billable hours are there?
Meetings, internal projects and sales activities are part of it, but too many indirect hours weigh on the margin.
With clear agreements and real-time insight via Fortes Milestones, you keep the ratio of billable to non-billable hours healthy.
10. How much vacation and overtime is accrued?
An office can seem to be running well all year, but miss out on profits at the end of the year due to a lot of accrued vacation or overtime.
By structurally monitoring this balance in Milestones, you avoid surprises at the year-end closing and keep a grip on the bottom line.
Greater insight with Fortes Milestones
With Fortes Milestones, you automate the registration of hours, scheduling, invoicing and reporting. By linking this data to Power BI, you create dashboards with all the key KPIs for your accounting firm: capacity, productivity, billability, margin and more.
Ready for more grip?
Fortes helps accounting firms gain insight that goes beyond just numbers.
Wondering how your firm can benefit from better capacity planning and data-driven steering?
Contact us for a no-obligation demo or introduction.