The numbers tell the story and it all boils down to time management. If you bill for your time directly or on an hourly basis, diligent timekeeping is something you must do in order to get paid for all of the work you perform for clients. If you bill on a fixed-fee basis, accurate time records help determine how profitable specific clients and projects really are - and if they're unprofitable, time records help us realize the viability of a client for the long term.

How can you increase your billings while working the same amount - or less?

1. Make accurate timekeeping a top priority. You must have an accurate account of how you spend your time. Without it, you may lose significant pieces of legitimate billable time. In other words, you performed the work, but were unable to bill because you lost track of it.

In fixed-fee engagements, accurate time tracking will allow you to gauge the profitability of a given project, client or both. Given the number of hours that you put into a project or client, was the engagement worthwhile? Should you quote a higher price next time? Should you ditch a money-losing client? A solid handle on your time will make answering these questions much easier.

2. Reconcile your time daily. My company, Chrometa, recently surveyed more than 500 billing service professionals - a group that included many CPAs - about their billing and time-tracking habits. Respondents that billed hourly estimated that they were capturing only 67 percent of their legitimate billable time - so they are working three hours for every two that they are able to bill! This means that a firm with $200,000 in gross billings could be losing as much as a $100,000 a year for work that they performed, but never billed.

How often do these folks reconcile their time? Quite infrequently, they admitted. Over half of all respondents said that they usually didn't reconcile their time more than once a week - with some reconciling only monthly and some not at all.

On average, respondents spent over two hours each week on this reconciliation, searching through sent e-mails, calendar entries, notes and other items to build a seat-of-the-pants, somewhat-inaccurate "forensic analysis" to reconstruct their time.

As you would expect, respondents who reconciled their days more accurately and more frequently were able to account for all their time.

3. Record your time concurrently. Do you remember what you worked on yesterday morning? How about Tuesday of last week?

After the fact, it's very difficult to recall exactly what work you performed. We're all busy throughout the work day amidst a barrage of interruptions - the phone rings, an e-mail hits your inbox: You know the drill. It's getting harder and harder to focus.

The longer you go without recording your time, the more difficult it is to recall how you spent it. The optimal time to record your time is to do it as you are working on something. Granted, due to the ever-increasing urge to multitask, this is easier said than done, but you'll make your life a lot easier if you can jot down notes or time entries as you work.

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