Stop the silent killers of your margins
Unbilled work, bloated processes, and rising costs quietly erode profit. Timely helps you spot where revenue is leaking, so you can tighten operations and protect your bottom line.
Protect every hour. Protect your margins.
Timely tracks billable time automatically, so nothing slips through the cracks. With AI suggestions and real-time insights, you stay in control of costs and keep your margins healthy.
Keep projects profitable and teams balanced
Timely helps you manage time, budget, and capacity in one place. Real-time tracking and seamless integrations give you the visibility to stay on budget and avoid burnout.
“As an agency, we don’t sell products - we sell our time and expertise. If we can’t track our time accurately, we have nothing to invoice for.”
Lifting margins with better time insights
A Timely customer in the professional services space struggled to identify where margin was being lost, and after implementing time tagging and project reporting saw a 12% increase in billable realization and a 5 percentage point uplift in operating margin.
Assumptions
- 20 billable staff
- 37.5 hours per person per week = 750 total hours/week
- Initial realization rate = 65% = 488 billable hours/week
- Post-Timely realization rate = 73% = 548 billable hours/week
- Average billable rate = $110/hour
- Timely cost = 20 users * $22 = $440/month
Workings
- 548h – 488h = 60 additional billable hours/week
- 60h * $110 = $6,600/week in extra billables
ROI
- Timely’s monthly cost was recouped in less than half a day
- The additional 60 billable hours/week delivered $26,400/month in new revenue, helping lift margins without increasing delivery effort
.png)
.avif)
How to get it done in Timely
Timely helps businesses track time accurately, optimize resources, and reduce inefficiencies, leading to better profitability without increasing workload.
Automate your time tracking
Download the Memory App to effortlessly capture every billable hour!
Set up your user rates
You'll be able to set default billable and cost rates that cover your entire business, as well as, user specific rates in Timely.
Create your custom reports
Add the details that are important to your reporting and track key metrics across your operations
Export and analyze
Gain deep insights and make data-driven decisions based on real data - helping you to maximize your margins!
Ready to make the most of your time?
.svg){kind=icon}
Maximizing your business margins with Timely
What are business margins and why do they matter?
Business margins measure the difference between revenue and costs as a percentage, showing how efficiently a company turns income into profit. For consultancies, agencies, SaaS companies, and professional services firms, strong margins indicate financial health and operational efficiency. Whether it’s an agency pricing its services correctly or a consultancy optimizing billable hours, understanding margins is essential for long-term success.
The relationship between margins and pricing strategy
Margins are directly impacted by how a business prices its products or services. Underpricing leads to low profitability, while overpricing can drive away customers. Agencies and consultancies must balance competitive rates with the need to cover overhead costs and maintain profitability, while SaaS businesses must account for customer acquisition costs and ongoing development expenses. Without real-time financial insights, adjusting pricing to protect margins becomes a challenge.
%20(1).png)
Factors that impact business margins
Margins are influenced by labor costs, operational inefficiencies, and resource allocation. For professional services businesses, the balance between billable and non-billable time directly affects profitability. Agencies often see margin erosion due to scope creep and inefficient processes, while SaaS businesses may face high customer acquisition costs and infrastructure expenses. Identifying where money is lost is key to improving financial performance.
Challenges in maintaining strong margins
Maintaining strong margins comes down to balancing revenue growth with cost control. Businesses that rely on client work often experience fluctuating demand, making it harder to maintain steady profitability. Scope creep, untracked work, and operational inefficiencies all contribute to margin erosion. Without visibility into how time and resources are spent, businesses risk operating at lower-than-expected margins.
Measuring and tracking margins effectively
To improve margins, businesses need accurate data on revenue and costs. Gross margin (revenue minus direct costs) and operating margin (which includes both direct and indirect costs) provide key financial insights. Beyond financial statements, businesses should analyze project profitability, client value, and employee utilization to understand where margins are strongest and weakest.
Strategies for improving business margins
Businesses can strengthen margins by streamlining processes, improving time tracking, and reducing inefficiencies. Agencies and consultancies should focus on optimizing billable utilization, controlling scope creep, and ensuring accurate invoicing. SaaS businesses can refine pricing strategies and improve customer retention. By focusing on operational efficiency, businesses can improve profitability without simply raising prices.
How Timely can help
Enhancing business margins with Timely
Timely offers a bunch of tools designed to help businesses across various industries - including consultancies, agencies, SaaS companies, and professional services - optimize their operations and improve profit margins. Automatic time tracking, detailed reporting, and project management features makes Timely a game-changing tool that enables firms to gain accurate insights into their workflows and financial performance.
By seamlessly integrating into existing workflows, Timely reduces administrative burdens, allowing professionals to focus more on client-related tasks. This holistic approach not only enhances productivity but also contributes to increased profitability and operational efficiency.
Automatic time tracking for precise billing
Timely’s automatic time tracking is powered by the Memory app, which operates unobtrusively in the background on your device, capturing all work activities without manual input. This ensures that every billable hour is recorded accurately, reducing the risk of unbilled work and revenue leakage. With precise data on time allocation, businesses can identify inefficiencies and optimize processes to enhance profitability.
The Memory app tracks time spent across various applications and tasks, creating a comprehensive overview of daily activities. This continuous tracking allows businesses to pinpoint non-billable tasks consuming valuable time and address them accordingly, leading to better resource utilization and improved profit margins.
Detailed reporting for informed financial decisions
Timely provides customizable reports that offer insights into individual and team performance, project costs, and overall profitability. By analyzing these reports, businesses can identify patterns in billable and non-billable hours, assess project profitability, and make data-driven decisions to improve margins. Access to real-time financial data empowers companies to adjust strategies promptly and effectively.
These reports can be tailored to specific metrics, such as project profitability or employee productivity, offering a granular view of operations. Regularly reviewing this data enables management to implement targeted strategies, optimize resource allocation, and ultimately enhance the firm’s financial health.
.png)
Project and team management tools
With Timely, businesses can assign tasks, set budgets, and monitor progress in real-time. This visibility helps in balancing workloads, preventing employee burnout, and ensuring that resources are allocated effectively to maximize billable hours. Efficient project management contributes to cost control and improved profit margins.
The platform’s intuitive interface allows managers to oversee multiple projects simultaneously, tracking each one’s status and financial health. By centralizing all project-related information, teams can collaborate more efficiently, meet deadlines consistently, and maintain high client satisfaction levels.
Integration with existing workflows
Timely integrates seamlessly with various project management and communication tools, embedding time tracking into daily workflows. This reduces administrative burdens and allows professionals to focus more on client-related tasks. Streamlined operations lead to cost savings and enhanced profitability.
By synchronizing with calendars, email platforms, and other essential software, Timely eliminates the need for duplicate data entry. This interconnectedness streamlines operations, minimizes the risk of errors, and fosters a more cohesive work environment.
.png)
Leveraging AI for improved accuracy
Timely utilizes AI to analyze work patterns and suggest time entries, minimizing manual errors and ensuring that all billable work is accounted for. This provides a clearer picture of utilization rates and areas for improvement. Accurate time tracking and analysis enable businesses to refine their pricing strategies and operational processes, directly impacting profit margins.
The AI learns from user behavior over time, becoming more accurate in its suggestions and reducing the cognitive load on employees. This intelligent assistance not only saves time but also enhances the reliability of time tracking, leading to more precise billing and better financial forecasting.
