An accounting team leader explains why tracking time in spreadsheets matters, even when it feels tedious. A project manager built a tool to forecast workload and schedule projects better. The data reveals which work actually makes money.
We have two magical spreadsheets. Our accounting and bookkeeping team are extremely big on utilization rates and time tracking and profitability and all that. And they have talked us into tracking our time for many years, which is the one thing we do that feels unalydia to me. Like, it feels a little corporate. It's not fun, it's not relaxed, it's not creative. Nobody loves it, but we all do it. And we've been getting really good data for a while. And. And so one of our project managers, in her spare time, she spent, I don't know, six months maybe, just kind of pecking away at this. And then she came to us and she's like, I've put together this spreadsheet, and it tracks our utilization rates, and it also has profitability per client. And so now we can look at the spreadsheet. We can see exactly how busy everybody on our team is forecast to be in the future, because in ClickUp, we've got all those task estimates put together. And then we can see how busy they are this week and next week and all through the next few months, and we can decide where to schedule projects.
