Selling time is the business model

If you sell time and expertise, that's essentially your product — the hours of your consultants, employees, or freelancers. But not all time is equal. There are three fundamentally different types of time that together determine whether your business is profitable — or not.

1. Billable Time: the hours you invoice

This is the time you charge to your clients. A consultant working 8 hours at a client — those hours go on a timesheet and get invoiced. This is your revenue.

In practice, most resource-driven businesses record billable time in **Excel spreadsheets** or a **project management tool**. Sometimes even on paper. The consultant fills in hours weekly or monthly, the back office processes them, and eventually an invoice is created.

2. Non-Billable Time: the hidden cost

Non-billable time is internal work that isn't invoiced to clients. Think of:

Internal training** and education:

Team events** and meetings:

Administrative work** between assignments:

Bench time** — when a consultant has no active assignment:

Onboarding** of new employees:

These hours are often logged against tasks in a project management tool, or — and this is the problem — **not recorded at all**. They disappear into a black hole. Yet they cost you money: you pay wages for hours that generate no revenue.

3. Absences: sickness, leave, and holidays

The third type of time usually sits in yet another system: the **payroll system**. Here you record:

Vacation days** and leave:

Sick days**:

Public holidays**:

Parental leave** and other statutory absences:

This information is crucial to your margin, because a consultant who's sick or on vacation generates no revenue — but the wages keep running.

The problem: 3 systems, no overview

This is the core of the problem. In most resource-driven businesses, these 3 types of time sit in **3 different systems**:

Billable time** → Excel or a project management tool:

Non-billable time** → Tasks in a PM tool, or nowhere:

Absences** → Payroll system:

The result? **No reconciliation possible.** You can't see at a glance: of the 160 hours available this month, how many were billable, how many non-billable, and how many absent?

Founders and managers end up building their own **Excel sheets**, manually entering data from all those different systems every month. Per consultant. Per assignment. Per month. Just to get an idea of how the business is doing.

That's not just time-consuming — it's also error-prone and already outdated the moment you look at it.

The impact on your margin

Selling time is a business model with **structurally low margins**. Margin per consultant typically sits between 15% and 25%. Every unrecorded non-billable hour, every unexpected sick day, every forgotten bench period eats directly into that margin.

Without an overview of all 3 types of time:

You don't know your real utilization rate**:

You can't calculate cost-to-serve per consultant**:

You miss trends** in sick leave or bench time:

You react too late** to margin pressure:

You make decisions on gut feeling** instead of data:

How MILLY solves this

MILLY is built on one conviction: **these 3 types of time belong in one platform**. Not as an afterthought, but as the core of the system.

In MILLY, you record:

- ✅ **Billable timesheets** — with approval flows and direct invoicing

- ✅ **Non-billable time** — training, internal work, bench time

- ✅ **Absences** — leave, sickness, public holidays

And that's exactly why our dashboards are so powerful. We simply have **all the data**. No Excel reconciliation needed. No manual merging of systems. One source of truth.

You see in real time:

Utilization rate** per consultant, team, or business unit:

Margin** per assignment, client, or period:

Bench time** trends and forecasting:

Sick leave** patterns:

Total cost-to-serve** including all non-billable costs:

Stop with Excel, start with visibility

The 3 types of time aren't separate puzzle pieces. They're inseparably connected. Only when you bring them together do you get the full picture of your business's performance.

Ready to manage all 3 types of time in one platform?