Timesheets Don’t Equal Value

I believe that as a professional advisor, it is a privilege to serve our clients with value.  As professional advisors and accountants, we clearly fit the definition of a knowledge-worker – we create wealth for our clients with our ideas and recommendations.

Therefore, if we’re creating value with our ideas and recommendations, what does time have to do with it? Time has nothing to do with value creation. We can use our time efficiently and still be completely ineffective at generating value for clients.

If we’re using time but creating no value for our client, why should the client be required to pay? How can we use time as a pricing tool when it yields no value? How can we track productivity without taking effective value creation into account? How can we track profitability based on time when there is a clear conflict between the customer and the advisor as to how much time to spend?

Therefore, timesheets and time become irrelevant and we must focus on our clients and the value that we are creating. This is the only way to effectively set prices for our services. We must tie our remuneration (price) with the value generated to ensure a win/win/win relationship between us and the customer. Timesheets simply don’t do this.

Ron Baker has an excellent article on our web site with more information on timesheets called “Trashing the Timesheet”