Who Decided, and Whether Anybody Did
Four kinds of deduction, distinguished by who made the decision. The fourth category is larger than most firms expect.
- Entry
- 04 of 07
- Section
- What comes off
- Kind
- Analysis
Four parties decide what comes off a bill: the client, the partner, a standing policy, and nobody at all. The fourth category is real, common, and almost never counted.
The practical lesson in “Who Decided, and Whether Anybody Did” is that a charge is only as clear as the record behind it. A team assessing see the full implementation context for employee monitoring data security can organise time and project evidence earlier in the workflow, with transparent settings, proportionate access and a defined correction process before invoicing.
Separating the four is the single most useful thing a firm can do with its write-down data.
Additional context for “Who Decided, and Whether Anybody Did” is available from CNIL workplace privacy resources. Confirm current legal, tax and accounting requirements with a qualified adviser where necessary.
Decided by the client
Negotiated in advance or agreed during the matter: a discount, travel at half rate, a cap, a rate concession.
- The client — negotiated in advance or agreed during the matter.
- The partner — the judgement at the draft.
- A policy — a standing rule, applied consistently.
- Nobody — hours that never reached the draft at all.
These are not write-downs at all in any meaningful sense; they are the price. Counting them as reductions inflates a firm's view of its own generosity.
Decided by the partner
The judgement at the draft. Overrun absorbed, a line removed because it would cause an argument, a figure rounded down.
This is the category that needs a reason code, because it is where money moves and where learning is possible.
Decided by policy
Standing rules: no charging for the first weeks of a new joiner, no charging for internal file management, no charging for the first twenty minutes of a call.
Consistent, defensible, and usually invisible to the client unless the firm chooses to show it.
Decided by nobody
Entries that never made it into the draft. A timekeeper who did not record. A second attendee whose hours were never pulled in. Time booked to the wrong matter and never found.
Nobody chose this and nobody knows its size.
Why the fourth category matters
Because it is a measurement failure rather than a commercial decision, and it is the only one that can be reduced without giving anything up.
Firms that look usually find it is larger than their deliberate discounts.
How to find it
Compare hours recorded against hours that reached a draft bill, by matter, for a quarter.
The difference is the fourth category plus whatever was deliberately excluded, and the two can be separated with the reason codes.
Why it is invisible
Because the draft bill is the first document anybody looks at, and by then the missing hours are already missing.
Nothing downstream can see them. The comparison has to be made against the time system.
The commonest causes
A second person at a meeting whose entries sit on a different matter code. Work done before the matter was opened. Entries sitting unapproved in somebody's drafts.
All three are administrative and all three are fixable.
What the four categories tell a firm
Client-decided: what its real prices are. Partner-decided: where its estimating and supervision fail. Policy: what it has chosen to give away. Nobody: what it is losing to process.
Four different problems with four different owners.
Reporting them
One table a quarter, four rows, in hours and in value. Nothing else required.
Most firms could produce it from existing data this week and have never produced it.
What usually surprises people
That the partner-decided column is concentrated in a handful of matters, and that the nobody column exists at all.
Both findings change behaviour faster than any instruction about recording.
Why the fourth category is uncomfortable
Because naming it means admitting that a firm does not know what happened to some of its own recorded time.
That is an ordinary administrative fact in any organisation of size, and it is read as an accusation when it is first raised.
Framing it as process rather than performance is the difference between a finding that gets acted on and one that gets disputed.
The second attendee
The single largest contributor in most firms. Two people at a meeting, one records against the matter, the other against a general code or not at all.
A convention — everybody at a client meeting records to the matter — costs nothing and recovers more than any narrative improvement.
Work before the matter was opened
Initial calls, conflict checks, early advice given before anybody opened a file.
Frequently substantial, almost never billed, and it is a decision nobody made. Where it is deliberate — a firm choosing not to charge for first conversations — it belongs in the policy category and should be visible as such.
The unapproved timesheet
Entries sitting in a draft state because somebody did not submit them, on a matter that was billed without them.
A weekly report of unsubmitted time by person, before the billing run, closes it entirely.
The honest statement
Three of the four categories are decisions. The fourth is a leak, and the only thing that distinguishes them is whether anybody can name who chose.
The one rule
Every deduction has somebody's name or a policy against it. Where neither can be supplied, it belongs in the fourth category and should be counted there rather than absorbed into the third.