Automatic time tracking for engineering and built environment firms, including the hours spent on site.
Lotus captures your team's time as the work happens, at the desk and in the field, accurately, against the right project, and with a full audit trail behind every entry. Bill time-charged work with confidence, protect the margin on fixed-fee (lump-sum) projects, and stop losing the site visit that never made it onto a timesheet. No manual timers. No Friday reconstruction.
Your day is spread across a dozen projects. Your timesheet remembers three.
Engineering and built environment work is fragmented by nature. A morning might touch a site inspection, two client calls, a design review, a variation query and a fee proposal, across four or five job numbers. That fragmentation is exactly what memory handles worst.
Recall of detail drops sharply within a day of the work and keeps falling through the week.4 By Friday, a week of ten-minute switches between projects has collapsed into a few round numbers against the projects that happened to stick. The hours are gone. The work was done and the salary paid; the client was simply never billed for it.
The industry is feeling the squeeze. Across professional services, billable utilization fell to 68.9% in 2024, below the 75% mark most firms need to hold, and the lowest in five years, with margins falling alongside it.1 Some of that is genuinely non-chargeable. A meaningful share is chargeable work that happened and was never recorded against a project.
Nor is this 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.2
Time away from the desk has no digital trail at all. The visit to site, the hour with the contractor, the drive between two jobs, the defect walk that turned into a two-hour discussion: none of it leaves a record unless someone stops and writes it down, usually while standing on a site in the rain. Predictably, it's the first thing to be estimated later or dropped entirely.
The variation you did the work for and never claimed.
On site it's agreed in a sentence. In the fee, it disappears.
Every firm in this industry knows the conversation. You're on site, the client asks whether you can look at something that wasn't in the brief, and you do, because it's an hour, because the relationship matters, because saying no on site is awkward. Multiply that across a project and it stops being an hour.
The unclaimed variation
A variation claim needs evidence: what was done, when, by whom, for how long. If the time was never captured, or captured as a round number on a Friday, the claim is either not made or made in a form the client can push back on. The work happened. The fee didn't move.
Lump sum: margin eaten invisibly
With no reliable running total of effort against the fee, a project quietly consuming more than it earns looks fine until the final reckoning. Delivery pressure shows in the numbers: overruns rose to 11.3% in 2024, on-time delivery slipped to 73.4%.1
Time-charged: bills you can't substantiate
Detail is what stands up when a client questions a fee, and what can't be substantiated gets discounted, disputed, or written off. The hours spent defending it aren't chargeable either.
Not all of the extra effort is scope; 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 project runs, so the effort is visible while there's still a decision to make. And it compounds: if the true effort is never recorded, the next fee proposal is priced from the same optimistic estimate.
Capture the hours wherever and whenever the work happens.
The outcome is an accurate, project-level record of what the work actually took, including the parts that happen away from a screen. On time-charged work, that's an invoice and a variation claim you can evidence. On lump sum, it's a margin you can watch while the project is live, and a better basis for pricing the next fee proposal. Here's how Lotus gets there.
At the desk, a lightweight agent 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 project.
Away from the desk, the mobile app captures the work a desktop agent can't see. Site visits can be recorded through opt-in geofencing, so arriving at a site starts the record without anyone remembering to. Calls, meetings and travel that aren't tied to a location are logged in a few taps, while they're fresh. The app works offline and syncs when signal returns, which matters on sites where it often doesn't.
Back at the desk, Lotus surfaces the gaps in the day, the hour in a meeting room, the conversation with a colleague about a job, and prompts your team to account for them before the detail fades.
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, rounding to whatever increment your firm uses while keeping the true captured value underneath.
On location and privacy
Site capture is opt-in, and it detects arrival and departure at agreed sites, never a live location trail. Lotus captures metadata about the work (which application, which document, which window), never its content. No screen recording, no keystrokes, no reading client material, no following where your people go.
What accurate time gives an engineering firm.
Price the next project from the last one.
Accurate effort data turns fee proposals from an art into a science: what that kind of project really takes, which stages run long, where the unbudgeted hours go. Estimating from evidence instead of optimism.
A clearer view of where time and work stand.
Lotus tracks tasks and deliverables against their due dates, and shows how much effort a project 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 team's own time in their pocket, captured, reviewed and submitted from wherever they're working.
A lighter load on your people.
Timesheets are usually the last thing done at the end of a long day, often after a drive back from site. Big-Four research argues productivity is better measured through passive data than self-reported hours, and that the manual version quietly costs wellbeing.3 Taking the timekeeping burden off your team won't fix a hard project week, but it removes one of the frictions that makes it worse.
Questions engineering firms ask.
How does it capture time on site?
Through the mobile app. Site visits can be recorded automatically using opt-in geofencing, so arriving at an agreed site starts the record, and anything else is logged in a few taps. It works offline and syncs when signal returns.
Is it tracking where our people are?
No. Site capture is opt-in, and it detects arrival and departure at sites you've set up. There's no live location trail, and nothing about a person's movements is recorded or reported.
We do both lump-sum and time-charged work. Does that matter?
No. The record is the same either way. On time-charged work it’s what you bill and evidence; on lump sum it’s what delivery cost you, visible while the project is still running rather than at the end.
Can it capture time against specific projects and job numbers?
Yes. Time is allocated to the right client and project as it’s captured, and your team confirms it before anything is final. You use your own project structure and your own language for it.
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.
Is this surveillance software? Our team 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 files, no live location. It records what’s needed to build an accurate timesheet, and nothing more.
See it on a real project workflow.
A short demo shows Lotus capturing time at the desk and on site, building timesheets, and the reporting on top, with the data behind it. Twenty minutes, no obligation.
- SPI Research, 2025 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark (403 professional services organisations, including architecture and engineering firms): billable utilization of 68.9% in 2024, below the ~75% optimal threshold and the lowest in five years; project overruns rising to 11.3%; on-time project delivery of 73.4%.
- 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 chargeable time (not additional hours worked), a conservative charge-out rate below typical market rates, and a realistic number of chargeable weeks per year. On time-charged work, recovered time must still be billed and collected to become revenue; on lump-sum work it represents cost visibility rather than additional revenue. The calculator shows recoverable time, not guaranteed revenue.