Automatic time tracking for accounting firms, capturing the chargeable hours manual entry misses.
Lotus captures your team's time as the work happens: accurately, against the right engagement, and with a full audit trail behind every entry, so the hours you work are the hours you can bill, through busy season and beyond. No manual timers. No end-of-week reconstruction. No client data ever leaving the firm.
Your firm sells time. It records less of it than you think.
An accounting firm's revenue is its people's chargeable time, yet the record of that time is one of the least reliable data sets the firm has, reconstructed at the end of the day or week from calendar, inbox and files.
The numbers show the cost. Firm-wide utilization across the profession has fallen to under 60% of available time.1 Some of that is genuinely non-chargeable. But a meaningful share is chargeable work that was done and never recorded, and the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) says so in its own benchmark: firms that lean hard on realization targets can push their people to under-record the time they actually worked.1
The leaks are predictable. The quick client call. The ten minutes reviewing a junior's file. The email that turned into advice. The re-open of a return to check one figure. Each one is chargeable, and each one is the first thing to vanish when time is reconstructed from memory days later.
It isn't a discipline problem; it's how memory works. Nor is it a fringe view that this matters: PwC found that firms still rarely track time at this level, and that management decisions get made without the data, yet even among firms not tracking today, more than a third accept it would lift productivity.2
Nowhere does this bite harder than in busy season. When tax deadlines, year-ends and quarter-ends hit, chargeable hours spike, and so does the admin around them. The time most likely to go unrecorded is the time captured under the most pressure, when a preparer is moving between a dozen engagements a day and logging none of them until Friday. The busier the season, the more the leak costs.
Put your firm's number on it.
Enter your own figures. This shows recoverable chargeable time: hours already worked that better capture converts back into chargeable work.
Illustrative, not a quote. Shows recoverable chargeable time; those hours still have to be billed and collected to become revenue. Calculation basis is in the References below.
Under-recorded time is revenue you earned and gave away.
It doesn't show up as a loss. It shows up as work that was never charged.
When chargeable time is reconstructed rather than recorded, it comes out low. The hours a preparer can't remember, they don't record, so the firm never bills them. This isn't a discount decided at review; it's revenue that quietly never enters WIP at all.
Invisible, not discounted
A write-down is at least visible: someone chose to reduce the bill. Under-recorded time is invisible: the work was done, the salary was paid, and the fee was never raised because the hour was never logged. It doesn't appear on any report as a loss, which is exactly why it persists year after year.
The realization trap
The AICPA points straight at it.1 Manage hard enough to realization targets, and recording every hour starts to feel risky; hours likely to be written off drag the number down, so they quietly don't get recorded. Realization looks healthy. The firm has optimised the ratio and lost the revenue it was meant to protect.
Corrupted estimates
If the true hours are never recorded, the firm never learns what the work takes. The job that really runs nine hours is recorded at six, so it's quoted at six again next year, and the overrun gets blamed on the team rather than the estimate. It quietly corrupts every quote, budget and capacity plan built on it.
Multiply one preparer's unrecorded chargeable time across a whole team, across a whole year, and the number the firm never sees becomes the difference between a good year and a great one.
Capture the hours as they happen. Bill what you actually worked.
Lotus runs a lightweight agent on the desktop that captures time automatically as your team works. It reads the labels around the work, never its content, and builds each timesheet in near real time, allocated to the right engagement.
Not all chargeable work leaves a digital trail, though. The corridor question about a client, the quick review of a junior's file, the phone call away from the desk: when someone returns to their desk, Lotus surfaces that gap in the day and prompts them to account for it, while it's fresh, rather than leaving it to be reconstructed later. For time out of the office, whether a client site or a call on the move, the mobile app captures it in the field.
Your team reviews, adjusts and approves before anything is final, adding notes against an entry as they go. Time then flows to the systems that bill it, with Lotus as the accurate source of truth for time. It rounds to the increment your firm bills in, and keeps both the actual captured time and the rounded value.
For most firms it's the first time they've had a true record of where their time actually went, not an estimate of it, and not a reconstruction. The fees, the quotes, the capacity plans: all of it improves once the record underneath is right.
On confidentiality
Lotus captures metadata (which application, which document, which window), never the content of the work. No screen recording, no keystrokes, no reading client files. It's automatic time capture your firm can install without putting client confidentiality at risk.
What accurate time gives an accounting firm.
Higher utilization, without longer hours.
With utilization across the profession sitting under 60%,1 there's real room to recover: not by working more, but by capturing the chargeable time already being worked and never logged. Record it accurately, and more of the day becomes billable.
Bills that reflect the work.
Detailed, contemporaneous time means engagements are billed for what they actually took: fewer surprises at WIP review, and a defensible record behind every fee.
Your team's time back.
Automatic capture takes the daily admin of timekeeping off your people: less time reconstructing the week, more time on client work. Every hour of admin is an hour that could have been chargeable.
Plan the next season from the last one.
Accurate time from this busy season is the data that lets you plan the next: where the hours actually went, which engagements ran hot, how much seasonal capacity you truly needed. Instead of staffing next year from memory and gut, you staff it from what really happened.
A clearer view of where time and work stand.
Lotus tracks tasks and deliverables against their due dates, and, because it runs on accurate captured time, shows how much time an engagement is consuming against its budget, live. It won't tell you whether the work is done well, but it will tell you what's outstanding, what's due, and where the time is going, while there's still time to act.
A lighter load on your people.
Timekeeping is often the last thing done at the end of a long day, and the pressure to reconstruct it feeds the always-on culture busy season is already infamous for. Big-Four research argues productivity is better measured by passive data than by self-reported hours, and that the manual version quietly costs wellbeing.3 Taking the timekeeping burden off your people won't fix a busy season, but it removes one of the frictions that makes it worse.
Questions accounting firms ask.
Does Lotus replace our billing system?
No. Lotus is the accurate source of truth for time. Your billing system draws the time data it needs from it, and you decide what flows where.
Can it capture time against specific engagements and clients?
Yes. Time is allocated to the right client and engagement as it's captured, and your team confirms it before anything is final. You use your own engagement structure and your own language for it.
Does it support the increments we bill in?
Yes. Lotus rounds to the increment your firm uses and keeps both the actual captured time and the rounded value, so you bill to your convention while the true record stays intact underneath.
Is this surveillance software? Our team won't accept that.
No, and that's by design. Lotus captures metadata, never the content of the work: no screenshots, no keystrokes, no reading files, no live location. It records what's needed to build an accurate timesheet, and nothing more.
What happens in busy season, when volume spikes?
Automatic capture matters most exactly then. It keeps recording accurately while your people are moving between engagements too fast to log time by hand, so the busiest weeks aren't the ones with the biggest leaks.
Can our people add notes to their time?
Yes. As they review an entry, they can add a note against it, captured alongside the time, while the detail is fresh.
See it on a real engagement workflow.
A short demo shows Lotus capturing time, building timesheets, and the reporting on top, with the data behind it. Twenty minutes, no obligation.
- American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), PCPS / CPA.com, National Management of an Accounting Practice (MAP) Survey (2023, reporting fiscal 2022), as reported in the Journal of Accountancy: firm-wide utilization of 59.6% (down from 62.3%), and the observation that firms emphasising realization may lead employees to under-record billable time.
- PwC, Productivity 2021 and beyond: hourly time tracking remains rare in professional firms; even among firms not already tracking, more than a third believe it would improve productivity; managerial decisions are often made with little specific workforce data.
- Deloitte, Measuring Workforce Productivity: argues workforce productivity is better measured through passive data than self-reported hours, and that traditional hours-based metrics can miss wellbeing.
Illustrative figures assume a starting point anchored to the sub-60% professional utilization benchmark (ref. 1), a modest target lift representing recovery of under-recorded chargeable time (not additional hours worked), a conservative charge-out rate below typical market rates, and a realistic number of chargeable weeks per year. Recovered chargeable time must still be billed and collected to become revenue; the calculator shows recoverable time, not guaranteed revenue.