Worksheet

Where your non-billable hours go

Eight kinds of administrative work that small tax and accounting practices absorb without billing for. Enter your own numbers and the worksheet totals them at your own rate.

1Your practice

Basis
What you actually collect per hour after write-downs — not your rack rate.
$
Weeks the practice runs at normal load.
Of the admin time you got back, what share would realistically become billable work? Set this to 0 if you'd simply go home earlier.
%

2Hours absorbed each week

Hrs / wk, whole firm

Count everyone who touches the work — you, staff, and admin. Estimate off a busy-season-adjusted average rather than this week specifically.

3What it totals

Computed

Annual value of recoverable time

$0

Enter hours above to compute.

Line detail
Category Hrs / yr Cost at your rate Recoverable Hrs back / yr
Total 0 $0 0
How the recoverable percentages were set

Each band is a deliberately conservative range for how much of a category a well-built system removes — not how much it could theoretically touch. They are judgement calls, stated openly so you can argue with them rather than take them on faith.

  • Deadline tracking and e-signature chasing carry the highest bands. They are rule-based, repetitive, and involve no professional judgement — a system does essentially all of the follow-up.
  • Document collection sits just below. Automated reminders reliably remove most of the chasing, but someone still reviews what arrives.
  • Notice handling is capped at half. Classification, deadline extraction and a first-draft response can be automated; the professional judgement about the position cannot, and shouldn't be.
  • Unbilled client questions carry the lowest band by a wide margin — 10–25%. This is mostly a scoping and engagement-letter problem, not an automation problem. Any tool that tells you otherwise is selling you something.

The capacity conversion input matters more than any of the bands. Most ROI calculators quietly value every recovered hour at your full billing rate, which assumes you immediately sell all of it. That is rarely true, so it is a number you set here rather than one assumed for you.