Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Agency time tracking exists to answer one question: did the fee cover the work. A $12,000 monthly retainer at a $120 target rate funds 100 hours. Deliver 128 and the effective rate drops to $93.75, with 28 hours of over-servicing worth $3,360. Hours by client, by role and by activity are what turn a retainer into a margin number.

Law firms bill time in tenths of an hour: six minutes is 0.1. Each entry carries a matter number, a timekeeper, the time, and a description of the work. Firms acting for corporate clients and insurers add UTBMS task codes and submit invoices in the LEDES format. The ABA Model Rules require the fee to be reasonable and the basis for it to be communicated to the client — and say nothing at all about rounding, which is where most of the trouble starts.

Dave Baker and Florian Duros (Element) at The Matrix Conference 2026. Element Web is moving onto the Matrix Rust SDK, the same foundation that powers Element X on mobile. Our team isn't doing it as one big rewrite. They're rebuilding the app one piece at a time as reusable shared components that don't care which SDK sits underneath.

Extra hours don't equal long-term productivity. Fix priorities, meetings, and workload, then track output next to burnout signals.

AI budgets have moved to the CEO and CFO, and they want proof. That was the clearest message at TSIA World 2026 in Las Vegas. "These budgets are at the C-suite. This is your customer now. The CEO, the CFO... they want to see the results." Thomas Lah, Executive Director, TSIA Most services firms aren't ready to give them that proof. TSIA's survey of its advisory board found: We spent three days in sessions, on the floor and at our booth.

Every services firm I talk to is measured on three things: delivering on time, keeping billable utilization healthy, and delivering projects profitably without over-servicing. AI should help with all three. So far, it's helping firms deliver faster. It isn't yet making them more profitable. SPI Research's 2026 Impact of AI on Professional Services study shows the gap. AI now touches 43.6% of projects, nearly double a year ago, and firms using it on most of their projects deliver far more of them on time.