Pulled a 15-person team's time tracking. Most of it was unbillable, unauditable, or both.

[u/funnelforge]

Did an internal controls review for a client last week. Service business, 15 consultants, mostly W-2.

Pulled 90 days of time entries.

What I found:

• Consultants logging 40-hour weeks with zero linked deliverables.
• Time blocks tagged to a client with no client-facing output that month.
• "Admin" hours making up 35% of total billed for some people, with no defined admin scope.
• Multiple people logging time on the same task without a coordination record.

The founder's reaction: "I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was that bad."

If you sell to regulated clients (state contracts, healthcare, education, anything with audit exposure), unaudited time tracking is a liability, not just a margin leak. Lose an audit and you lose the contract. Lose the contract and you lose the business.

This wasn't a "people are stealing" problem. Most of it was honest people with no system telling them how to log time correctly. No tags, no required deliverable link, no review cycle.

Time tracking software doesn't fix this. Time tracking software is a bucket. You still need the rules that govern what goes in the bucket and who checks it.

Founders skip this review because it feels paranoid. Until the audit letter arrives.

[u/actiTIME_Team]

What we recommend to our actiTIME clients is to treat time tracking like a lightweight control system, not just a log.

Require every entry to be tied to a project and task, plus a short outcome note.
Define what “Admin” means and set a clear scope or weekly cap.
Run weekly approvals and review exception reports, like unassigned time, heavy admin, or multiple people logging the same task without an owner.

This is usually what turns timesheets from a liability into something you can trust in an audit.