Which clients cost you more than they pay?
Fixed monthly fees are simple to sell and hard to check. One client sends a tidy file on the first of the month. Another sends a carrier bag of receipts and phones twice a week. They pay the same. Daytide counts the time each one really takes.
Where the time goes missing.
How bookkeepers and accountants usually bill: fixed monthly fee, hourly for extras.
- Fixed fees hide the unprofitable clients
- You set the fee two years ago from a rough guess at the workload. The workload changed. Nobody has gone back to check, because checking would mean a month of careful timekeeping across the whole team.
- Thirty clients before lunch
- A bookkeeper moves between clients every few minutes. Starting and stopping a timer for each one is not realistic, so the timesheet becomes an estimate, and the estimates flatter the difficult clients.
- Extras that never get billed
- A quick question by e-mail, a payroll correction, chasing a missing bank statement. Each one is small. Together they are a few hours a week that the fee was never meant to cover.
A day, as Daytide records it.
This is what one person sees for their own day. Pick an entry to see what the label was based on.
- 08:45 to 09:20E-mailSix clients, a few minutes each35 min
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the page title
- xero.com, 1 h 05: page title begins “Harbour Dental Group”
- Excel, 10 min: “Harbour Dental bank rec Oct”
- You confirmed this client on your first day
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the page title
- Dext, 25 min: “Kessler & Daughters inbox”
- xero.com, 15 min: page title begins “Kessler & Daughters”
Why here
Not sorted. Daytide asks instead of guessing.
- A spreadsheet called “Q3 reconciliation”, 14 min
- xero.com, 11 min, on a page with no client name in the title
One tap in chat puts it on the right client. The answer is remembered for that spreadsheet.
Why here
Sorted automatically, from a rule you approved
- Payroll software, 45 min: “Mill Lane School November run”
- Your rule: “Mill Lane” in a title means Mill Lane School
- 12:25 to 13:10AwayScreen locked, not counted45 min
Why here
On the personal list, so only the minutes are kept
- 15 min
- Banking sites are never recorded beyond “personal, 15 minutes”
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the file and folder
- Excel, 1 h 50: “Harbour Dental management accounts Oct”
- Word, 25 min, in the same client folder
- 15:40 to 17:00Nine smaller clientsShort jobs, 5 to 15 minutes each1 h 20
- Working time
- 7 h 15
- Sorted without asking
- 6 h 50
- Private
- 15 min
- Questions waiting
- 1
Tools the template already knows.
Anything not listed here is learned in calibration week. Daytide sees an unfamiliar tool, asks what it is for, and remembers.
- Ledgers
- Xero, QuickBooks, Sage
- Documents and receipts
- Dext, Hubdoc, Excel, PDF readers
- Practice management
- Karbon, Canopy
- Tax, where it applies
- DATEV, Lacerte, Drake, CCH, UltraTax
Most of this work happens in a browser, so the signal is the site and the page title rather than a file. In a ledger the client's name is usually in the title of the page, and that is what Daytide reads. Bank portals are on the personal list by default and are recorded only as minutes. You can move the ones you use for clients into work.
What the first week shows.
Time per client, next to nothing else
A plain table of hours per client for the week. Put your fee list beside it and the outliers are visible at once.
How much of the week is e-mail and chasing
Kind of work is kept separately from client, so you can see that a client took nine hours and that five of them were e-mail.
The same task, done by hand, again
Copying figures from PDFs into a ledger, building the same month-end pack. These show up in the Opportunities list with a rough figure in hours.
- Daytide: Yesterday 40 minutes went to a spreadsheet called “Q3 reconciliation” and to xero.com. Which client is that for?
- Harbour Dental Group
- Kessler & Daughters
- Something else
- Internal
What it will not tell you.
Daytide does not see amounts, invoices or anything inside your ledger. It sees that Xero was open on a page titled with a client's name, and for how long. It cannot tell you a client is unprofitable. It tells you the hours, and you know the fee.
Give it one normal week.
Install it, answer a handful of questions, and look at the picture on day seven. The trial runs for 30 days, so you see three more weeks after that before you decide anything.
No card needed to start. Want someone to set it up with you? Assisted onboarding is $250, credited to your first annual invoice.