Many organizations focus on turnover, margins and customer satisfaction — but forget one crucial link: declarability. How many hours are actually invoiced? How much value is leaking out in meetings, administration, or vaguely defined work?
The most important insights
- Declarability is the percentage of hours worked that is directly billable to customers
- Too low a declarability costs immediate turnover and puts margins under pressure
- Factors such as time tracking, planning, project scope and focus are crucial
- Tools like time registration and reports help with analysis and optimization
- Minor process improvements can result in dozens of additional billable hours per employee per month
What exactly is declarability?
Declarability (also known as “billability”) is the percentage of time worked that can be invoiced to customers. Do you work 40 hours a week, including 28 on customer projects? Then your declarability is 70%.
A high declarability means that your team delivers value efficiently — and thus generates more sales. Low declarability can indicate that too much time is lost on undeclarable tasks, such as internal meetings, administration or unclear planning.
For consulting firms, IT service providers, marketing agencies and other project-based organizations, this is a critical KPI.
📚 Learn more about the difference between declarability and productivity.
Why declarability matters
Declarability isn't a boring number from a spreadsheet — it tells you exactly how efficiently your team works and how much value you're actually delivering. Too low a percentage affects your turnover, planning and team dynamics. Below you can read why this KPI is indispensable for any service organization.
Direct effect on turnover
Every hour that isn't written on a customer project is literally a loss of revenue. At an average hourly rate of €100, just five unbillable hours per week quickly mean more than €20,000 in missed turnover per employee per year. At scale — with multiple employees or teams — that amount increases very quickly and hits your lower limit.
Insight into capacity
Low declarability often indicates underused capacity. Maybe someone has plenty to do, but they are working on tasks that are not billable. By making this clear, you can make better choices in your planning, resource allocation and the relationship between billable and non-billable work.
Imbalance signal function
If an employee is structurally low declarable, this is almost never a coincidence. It can indicate a mismatch between role and work, too much internal work, or simply lack of focus. Precisely because declarability is a number, you can use it as a neutral entry to discuss workload, division of roles and effectiveness.
Low declarability: 7 causes
Low declarability is rarely the result of laziness or unwillingness. These are the most common causes that ensure that valuable hours do not end up on the invoice — and therefore have a direct impact on your result.
1. No or incomplete time registration. You can't improve what you don't measure. Without reliable registration, you miss out on what time is really used up.
2. Too many internal tasks. Think of long meetings, ad-hoc meetings or slacking internal projects.
3. Bad project planning. Unrealistic time estimates, too many parallel tasks, or unclear roles result in a loss of time.
4. No clear project scope. Vaguely defined customer projects lead to unclear work and hours that are not billable.
5. Loss of focus. Switching between tasks or multitasking reduces the chance that employees work 'deep' billable hours.
6. Low productivity through tools or context switching. Jumping from tab to tab, searching for information, bad integrations — it counts.
7. Unclear communication with the customer. If you don't agree sharply on what is and isn't billable, time remains uninvoiced.
How to increase declarability
Do you want to work more efficiently and get more sales without extra pressure on your team? Then focus smartly on declarability. This step-by-step plan will help you get started right away.
1. Map the current declarability
Use reports or real-time dashboards to see:
- What the average billable percentage is per team, person, and project
- Which non-billable tasks take up a lot of time
- How that develops over weeks/months
2. Register every business day
Make sure employees record their hours every day, including breaks, internal time, and customer work. The more specific, the better.
📚 This is how to motivate employees to record their hours.
3. Minimize internal time
Analyze which internal processes take the most time (meetings, reports, onboarding, etc.) and ask critical questions:
- Does this meeting really have to be held weekly?
- Can this task be automated?
- Can we delegate or bundle this?
Automate where possible, for example with APIlinks between planning, tasks and time registration.
4. Improve project scoping
Make sure projects have a clear deliverable, deadline and time estimation. This is how you prevent scope creep — where employees do work that no longer falls within the original plan.
Tip: document agreements with customers about what is or is not billable, and keep that centrally available to the entire project team.
5. Facilitating focus & deep work
Limit context switching:
- Schedule billable work in blocks of at least 90 minutes
- Turn off notifications during deep work
- Avoid unnecessary task changes
6. Evaluate with the team
Raise awareness: discuss declarability in team meetings on a monthly basis. Make it negotiable if someone fails to spend time — without falling into accountability, but with an eye for improvement.
7. Make declarability part of your KPIs
Link declarability to performance indicators — but only if the context is right (role, type of customer, function). Not every employee has the same potential in terms of billable time, so differentiate.
Example: the difference that 5% makes
Suppose your team consists of 10 consultants with an average rate of €100 per hour and works 40 hours a week. A 5% increase in declarability means:
- 2 additional billable hours per employee per week
- 20 extra hours per week for the team
- 1,000 additional billable hours per year
- €100,000 extra turnover — without working more hours
Tools that make a difference
A good time registration tool is the backbone of your declarability. With TimeChimp, you have:
- Direct insight into billable vs. non-declarable work
- Automatic links with projects, planning and billing
- User-friendly registration via desktop, app or timer
- Smart reports per employee, team or project
- Link to budgets for real-time progress
Brief summary
Declarability is a direct lever for turnover, efficiency and customer value. By focusing, minimizing internal time and registering properly, you increase declarability without extra workload. Small adjustments make a big difference.
- Declarability = percentage of billable time
- Factors such as scope, planning, focus and tools are decisive
- Analyze and improve step by step — with data as a basis
- TimeChimp helps you streamline this process easily
👉 More control over declarability and planning? Try TimeChimp for free and learn how to get more out of every hour worked.
FAQs
Productivity measures how many hours an employee has worked compared to their contract hours, while declarability is the proportion of those hours that are actually billable — in other words, how much of the time worked is charged to customers. You can read more about this in this blog.
Focus on smart process improvements, such as:
- Daily and detailed time registration
- Fewer meetings and better planning
- Clear project scopes
- Automation of internal tasks
Small adjustments can quickly result in dozens of additional billable hours per month — without employees having to work anymore.
Use a tool like TimeChimp to:
- Billable vs. non-billable hours to be monitored in real time
- Generate reports per team, project or employee
- Analyze trends over weeks/months
Also, make sure you define what is and what is not declarable, so that your figures are unambiguous.
