Utilisation you can trust, without chasing timesheets.
In a consultancy, utilisation is the business. It is also a number built from timesheets that arrive late and are filled in to look reasonable. Daytide builds it from the work itself, by client and engagement, and shows each consultant their own week first.
Where the time goes missing.
How consultancies usually bill: day rate or fixed fee per engagement.
- Timesheets that arrive late and rounded
- Monday's reminder, Wednesday's second reminder, and then eight hours a day entered in a neat row. Good enough to invoice a day rate. Useless for finding out what an engagement takes.
- Internal work that swallows senior time
- Proposals, recruiting, internal meetings. Everyone knows it is a lot. Nobody knows how much, or who carries it.
- Fixed-fee engagements priced on instinct
- The partner who sold it remembers a similar project being about thirty days. The record that would confirm or correct that does not exist.
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.
- 08:30 to 09:00E-mailNo single client30 min
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the file and folder
- Excel, 1 h 40: “Harbour pricing model v6”
- PowerPoint, 35 min, in the same engagement folder
- You confirmed this engagement last week
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the meeting window
- Teams call, 1 h: “Harbour steering group”
- 12:15 to 13:00AwayScreen locked, not counted45 min
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the folder
- PowerPoint, 1 h 10, in ~/Proposals/2026
- Work in the Proposals folder counts as internal, by your firm's setup
Why here
You answered a question in chat
- Remote desktop, 2 h 30: session “KD-PROD”
- Daytide asked whether KD-PROD is Kessler & Daughters. You said yes.
From now on that session name is enough. What you did inside the session is not recorded.
- 16:40 to 17:30InternalRecruiting interview50 min
- Working time
- 8 h 15
- Sorted without asking
- 8 h 15
- Private
- 0 min
- Questions waiting
- 0
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.
- Everyday
- PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Outlook
- Calls
- Teams, Zoom
- Client systems
- Client VPN and remote desktops, client web portals
Consultants often work inside a client's own systems. A remote desktop or VPN session is itself a strong sign of which client the time belongs to, and Daytide treats it as one. It does not see what happens inside the remote session.
What the first week shows.
Time per client and engagement
Team-level totals for the week, built from the files and calls, not from memory.
Client work against internal work
The split the utilisation figure depends on, with proposals, recruiting and internal meetings as their own kinds of work.
Decks built from the same parts
The same slides and the same analysis rebuilt for each client. If it repeats enough, it appears in the Opportunities list.
- Daytide: Yesterday afternoon was spent in a remote desktop session called “KD-PROD”. Is that Kessler & Daughters?
- Yes, Kessler & Daughters
- No, another client
- Internal
What it will not tell you.
Days at a client's office on a client's laptop are invisible to Daytide unless the app is installed on that laptop, which is usually not yours to decide. Those days are added by the consultant in chat. One message covers a whole day.
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.