Guide · Time
Tracking billable hours in a design studio
Timesheets fail in design studios for predictable reasons. Here is a version that people actually fill in.
6 min read · Updated 5 September 2026
Why timesheets fail here
Design work does not decompose neatly. An afternoon can cover three projects, a client call and a supplier chase. Ask for fifteen-minute precision across all of it and you get one of two outcomes: nothing filled in, or Friday-afternoon fiction. Both are worse than no data, because fiction gets used for pricing.
Measure fewer things, properly
You do not need to know everything. You need to know enough to answer three questions: is this project profitable, is this person overloaded, and is our fee for this type of job realistic.
| Level | What it gives you | Cost to the team |
|---|---|---|
| Project only | Project profitability | Very low |
| Project + stage | Which stage eats the fee | Low |
| Project + stage + task | Detailed estimating data | High — usually abandoned |
Most practices should start at project plus stage. It answers the questions that change decisions, and it is light enough to survive a busy week.
Make it a thirty-second habit
- 01Start a timer when the work starts, rather than reconstructing the week later.
- 02Let people log from a phone — site visits are where the day disappears.
- 03Default the entry to the project someone worked on last.
- 04Review at week's end as a team ritual, not a manager's audit.
If your team believes time data is used to judge individuals, the data will be shaped to survive judgement. Use it on projects and fees, and say so out loud.
Turning hours into decisions
Time data earns its keep at exactly three moments: when you quote the next job of the same type, when a project's hours cross its fee, and when someone's week has been over capacity for a month. Everything else is reporting for its own sake.
- Compare hours against fee per stage, not per project — the overrun almost always has one home.
- Keep a running effective rate per project so a low fee shows up before completion.
- Track unbilled time separately; it is the earliest warning of scope creep.
How UpLabs handles this
UpLabs has a timer that starts against a project from phone or desktop, a weekly view for the team, and hours that flow straight into project profitability — so the same entry that took thirty seconds is what tells you whether the fee held.
Common questions
- Should principals track time too?
- Yes, at least at project level. Principal time is the most expensive hour in the practice and the one most often invisible in profitability numbers.
- What about non-project time?
- Give it a small set of buckets — business development, admin, studio work — rather than forcing it onto a project. Distorting project data to make hours add up defeats the purpose.