Automatic time tracking for consultancies, so you know what every engagement really costs.
Lotus captures your consultants' time as the work happens: accurately, against the right engagement, and with a full audit trail behind every entry. Bill time and materials with confidence, and price fixed-fee work from what delivery actually takes. No manual timers. No Friday reconstruction. No client material ever leaving your firm.
Your expertise is the product. Time is how you bill it, and that record is an estimate.
Whether you bill by the hour or by the engagement, time is how the work gets billed and what delivery costs you. Yet the record of that time is usually assembled after the fact, on a Friday, from calendar, inbox and half-memory.
The profession is feeling it. Billable utilization across professional services fell to 68.9% in 2024, below the 75% mark most firms need to hold, and the lowest in five years, with EBITDA margins falling alongside it.1 Some of that gap is genuinely non-billable. A meaningful share is billable or chargeable work that happened and was never recorded against anything.
The leaks are predictable, and they're the same whether the engagement is T&M or fixed fee. The client call taken between meetings. The half-hour reviewing a deliverable before it goes out. The “quick favour” that turned into two hours of analysis. The travel to a workshop. Each one is real delivery effort, and each one is the first thing to vanish when time is reconstructed days later.
It isn't a discipline problem; it's how memory works. Recall of detail drops sharply within a day of the work, and keeps falling through the week.5 Nor is it a fringe concern: PwC found firms still rarely track time at this level and make management decisions without the data, yet even among firms not tracking today, more than a third accept it would lift productivity.3
On time and materials, unrecorded time is unbilled revenue. On fixed fee, time doesn't bill anything; it is the cost of delivery, and without it you can't tell whether an engagement made money until it's over. The capture problem is the same; only the consequence differs.
Put your firm's number on it.
Enter your own figures. This shows recoverable delivery effort: on T&M it's billable revenue; on fixed fee it's cost visibility and better pricing.
Illustrative, not a quote. On T&M those hours still have to be billed and collected; on fixed fee this is cost visibility, not extra revenue. Calculation basis is in the References below.
The engagement you won, delivered, and didn't make money on.
You rarely find out while there's still something to be done about it.
Consulting's most expensive problem isn't the hour that goes unbilled. It's the engagement that quietly costs more to deliver than it earns, and the fact that nobody knows until it's over.
Fixed fee: invisible scope creep
The extra workshop, the third round of revisions, the stakeholder who needed bringing along: none of it triggers an alarm without a running total of effort against scope. Nearly half of consulting buyers report major changes across almost all their projects.2 Overruns rose to 11.3% in 2024, on-time delivery slipped to 73.4%.1
T&M: bills you can't defend
Time reconstructed on a Friday is short on detail, and detail is what stands up when a client questions an invoice. What can't be substantiated gets discounted, disputed, or written off, and the hours spent defending it aren't billable either.
Both: revenue leakage
Both roads end at revenue leakage, one of the metrics SPI Research ties most closely to whether a firm is profitable.1 It doesn't show up as a line item; it shows up as a year that should have been better. And it compounds: if true effort is never recorded, the next proposal is priced from the same flawed estimate.
Not all of that extra effort is scope creep; some is rework. Lotus won't tell you why the hours went in; it captures time, not judgements about the work. What it will show you is planned against actual, as the engagement runs, so the effort is visible while there's still a decision to make, not in the post-mortem.
Capture delivery effort as it happens. Price and bill from what's real and defendable.
The outcome is an accurate, engagement-level record of what delivery actually took. On time and materials, that's a bill you can stand behind line by line. On fixed fee, it's a margin you can see while the work is still live, and a far better basis for pricing the next one. Here's how Lotus gets there.
Lotus runs a lightweight agent on the desktop that captures time automatically as your consultants work. It reads the labels around the work, never its content, and builds each timesheet in near real time, allocated to the right client and engagement.
Not all delivery effort leaves a digital trail. The corridor conversation about a client problem, the whiteboard session, the call taken walking between meetings: when a consultant 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 on client sites and on the move, the mobile app captures it in the field.
Your consultants review, adjust and approve 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, and it rounds to whatever increment your firm uses while keeping the true captured value underneath.
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 material. It's automatic time capture you can put in front of a client-facing team, and in front of your clients' security questions, without difficulty.
What accurate time gives a consultancy.
Utilization you can actually manage.
With utilization across professional services under 70%,1 there's real room to recover: not by working people harder, but by capturing delivery effort that's already happening and never gets recorded. You can only manage what you can see, at the level of the individual and the week.
Margin visibility while the work is live.
Planned effort against actual, updating as the engagement runs, with rates applied, in dollars as well as hours. An overrun shows while there's still time to raise a change order or re-plan. Whether the hours went to extra scope or to rework, you see them accumulating against the plan rather than discovering them at the post-mortem.
Bills and fees that stand up.
On T&M, detailed contemporaneous records make an invoice straightforward to substantiate. On fixed fee, a clear record of what was delivered supports the scope conversation, and the next proposal.
Price the next engagement from the last one.
Accurate effort data is what turns estimating from an art into a record: what that kind of work really takes, which phases run long, where the unbudgeted hours go, so proposals get priced from evidence instead of optimism.
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 effort an engagement is consuming against its budget, live. It won't tell you whether the work is good, but it will tell you what's outstanding, what's due, and where the effort is going, while there's still time to act. The mobile app keeps your consultants' own time in their pocket, captured, reviewed and submitted from wherever they're working.
A lighter load on your consultants.
Timesheets are usually the last thing done at the end of a long delivery day, and the pressure to reconstruct them feeds an always-on habit consulting is already known for. Big-Four research argues productivity is better measured through passive data than self-reported hours, and that the manual version quietly costs wellbeing.4 Taking the timekeeping burden off your consultants won't fix a hard delivery week, but it removes one of the frictions that makes it worse.
Questions consultancies ask.
We do a lot of fixed-fee work. Is this still for us?
Yes. On fixed fee, time isn't what you bill; it's what delivery costs you. Lotus gives you an accurate view of effort against the fee while the engagement is live, so overruns surface early and the next proposal is priced from what the work actually takes.
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 clients and engagements?
Yes. Time is allocated to the right client and engagement as it's captured, and your consultants confirm it before anything is final. You use your own engagement structure and your own language for it.
Is this surveillance software? Our consultants won't accept it.
No, and that's by design. Lotus captures metadata, never the content of the work: no screenshots, no keystrokes, no reading client material, no live location. It records what's needed to build an accurate timesheet, and nothing more.
What about time on client sites and travel?
The mobile app captures time in the field, including client visits, workshops and calls on the move, so time away from the desk is recorded while it's fresh.
Our clients ask hard security questions about any tool touching their material. What do we tell them?
That Lotus never sees their material. It captures metadata about the work, such as application, document name and window title, and never content. There's a fuller answer for security teams; we're happy to have that conversation directly.
See it on a real engagement.
A short demo shows Lotus capturing time, building timesheets, and the reporting on top, with the data behind it. Twenty minutes, no obligation.
- SPI Research, 2025 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark (based on 403 professional services organisations): billable utilization of 68.9% in 2024, below the ~75% optimal threshold and the lowest in five years; EBITDA margin declining from 15.4% to 9.8%; project overruns rising to 11.3%; on-time project delivery of 73.4%; revenue leakage identified among the metrics most correlated with firm performance.
- Source Global Research, UK Consulting Market Report (annual survey of 200 senior buyers of consulting): almost half of organisations using consultants reported major changes, including descoping, deferrals or cancellations, across nearly all their consulting projects.
- 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; management 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.
- On memory and delayed recording: H. Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885), replicated in J. M. J. Murre & J. Dros, “Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve,” PLoS ONE 10(7), 2015: recall of new detail decays sharply within the first day and continues to fall over the following week.
Illustrative figures assume a starting point anchored to the ~69% billable utilization benchmark (ref. 1), a modest target lift toward the ~75% threshold representing recovery of unrecorded delivery effort (not additional hours worked), a conservative billing rate below typical consulting rates, and a realistic number of billable weeks per year. On time-and-materials work, recovered time must still be billed and collected to become revenue; on fixed-fee work it represents cost visibility rather than additional revenue. The calculator shows recoverable time, not guaranteed revenue.