My team has been very understaffed. We are lacking 2 managers, 1 associate, and 1 AD. The team is made up by me, my co worker, and our director. For the last 5 months my co worker takes off days at a time for emergencies and sick days but then will come back and tell me she had to take the week off because she was anxious or she went through a breakup. These days tend to fall on billing days so that means I have to pick up her work. This past week I made sure to grind so my Friday would (cont)
Personally I think it’s all BS. I have yet to see a project that’s completed with the budget, so I don’t understand the pressure that’s put on folks because of it. Perhaps Partners/MDs should be better at budgeting if that’s not the case.
I agree, upper management sets unrealistic expectations. Partners and directors lower the price of the engagement to attract the client, and then get upset when they can’t get it done “within budget”. Stop lying to the client and give them the true price of the engagement or stop harassing your employees and write off your unrealistic expectations 🤣
Yeah I meet it.......by eating hours! 🤣🤣🤣
@PwC 1 - I don’t advocate eating time, but your response has me dying 🤣🤣
There's a triangle of utilisation, quality, and recovery (budget). At any one time you will be sacrificing one to flatter the other two.
BDO 1 - My mechanic has this on a sign hanging in his shop. I wish we could put this in our client proposals, lol
Nope. Part of the reason I left.
correct budgeting requires management down across the firm to not eat hours. Unfortunately, that doesnt happen.
I've only met budgets on small engagements where I was a senior acting as manager, used India, and worked directly with the partner. But it's all fake. Hours get offset between engagements all the time
No but I can see where a reasonable budget is a baseline for expectations. If something that should take you 8 hours took you 40 there are two options- you were doing something else instead and waster time or the files you were looking at is trash or way more complex. Both are a possibility. Now if something is supposed to take you 8 hrs but your budget is 4 and you know they'll probably get mad - keep track of exactly what you did and how long it took. Been burned on that before and now starting to literally put it my notes when I enter time - took an hour to clean up TB to get it to the shape you could manipulate it etc. At least you will be able to justify your hours and if they mad - they crazy
Companies have enough built in cushion that at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter from a financial perspective. For staff-senior the hourly rate charged out of about $250-$350, our actual hourly rate is about 1/10 of that. But as a business owner you try to maximize profits by being efficient and keeping track of hours is one way.
Nope. Get the work at maximum agreeable price with client or Underbid the competitor. “Try” to make budgets work later.
I have one client where we are under budget and that’s only the case because it’s inter firm allocated budget with lots of room for some reason.
Some of my jobs go over, some don’t. Never anything too crazily out of whack though- the execs have always been happy at the end of the day. But luckily I work with good people and we make sure to create realistic budgets barring any unusual circumstances.