Productivity Reports

The Productivity reports answer a question every firm eventually asks: where does the time actually go? Your team logs hours against tasks all day, and these five reports turn that raw record into something you can read at a glance, how much of each person’s day is billable work versus administrative overhead, how the workload is spread across the firm, and how closely the time you estimate matches the time you actually spend.

A word up front, because these reports can feel like a stopwatch pointed at your desk: they are not built to watch people. They are built to surface the things that quietly cost a firm money and goodwill, time that was worked but never billed, an attorney quietly drowning while a colleague has room, and estimates that are always off in the same direction. Read them that way and they earn their place.

Utilization Rate

Lead with why: this is the report that tells you whether the hours your people work are turning into billable value, or disappearing into administrative work that no client pays for. Utilization Rate measures each person’s billable hours against the billable hours you expect of them, so you can see who is carrying their target, who has room to take on more, and who is buried in non-billable work that someone else should be doing.

Each row shows a person’s total hours, billable hours, their expected billable hours for the period, their utilization rate (billable divided by expected), their weekly billable target, and the variance in hours between what they billed and what was expected. The expected figure isn’t pulled from thin air: it starts from each person’s weekly billable-hours target (20 hours a week if no target is set), scaled to the length of the date range and adjusted down for any time off in that window, so someone on vacation isn’t unfairly marked as falling short.

Across the top, four summary figures frame the period: total billable hours, total expected hours, the firm’s overall utilization rate, and the total variance. A horizontal bar chart, Utilization by User, ranks everyone and color-codes each bar so the picture reads instantly: green for a strong rate (70% or higher), orange for acceptable (50% to 70%), and red for one that needs attention (under 50%). A red bar isn’t an accusation; it’s usually a sign that person is spending their day on work the firm should be capturing differently.

You can filter by date range and by user, and export the whole report to Excel or PDF.

User Productivity

Where Utilization gives you the headline rate, User Productivity gives you the detail behind it: a period-by-period breakdown of each person’s hours, split into billable and non-billable, so you can see how someone’s week or month actually came together. It’s the report to open when a utilization number surprises you and you want to know what’s underneath it.

You choose how finely to slice time with a Daily / Weekly / Monthly selector (it defaults to Weekly), and the report lists a row per person per period showing billable hours, non-billable hours, total hours, the average daily hours for that period, the target for the period, and the variance against that target. Any row can be expanded to drill down into the individual tasks that made it up, each task’s date, name, type, and hours, so the totals are never a black box; you can always trace a number back to the work behind it.

Four summary cards give the firm-wide totals (total hours, billable hours, average daily, and variance against target), and a stacked horizontal bar chart, Hours by User, shows each person’s billable and non-billable hours side by side so the balance between the two is obvious at a glance. Filter by date range and user, and export to Excel or PDF.

Time by Category

Not every productivity question is about people. Sometimes you want to know what kind of work is eating your week. Time by Category groups all logged hours by task category and shows you how your firm’s time is distributed across the types of work you do, useful for spotting that a surprising share of the firm’s hours is going somewhere you’d want to delegate, systematize, or reprice.

The report lists each category with its total hours, its percent of total, and an estimated value for those hours. The estimated value is a back-of-the-envelope figure, the hours multiplied by an average billing rate (the firm’s average, defaulting to $250 an hour where one isn’t available), so it’s a rough sense of what the time is worth, not a billing figure. Two summary cards show total hours and total estimated value, and a pie chart, Time Distribution, shows the same split visually so the dominant categories jump out.

Filter by date range and user, and export to Excel or PDF.

Time by Activity Type

This is the same lens as Time by Category, turned to a finer grain. Where categories group work broadly, Time by Activity Type breaks your hours down by the specific activity type recorded on each task (the kind of activity codes a firm uses to describe exactly what was done), so you can see, for example, how much time goes to drafting versus calls versus research within the day-to-day.

The columns mirror the category report: each activity type with its hours, percent of total, and estimated value (again, hours times the firm’s average rate, defaulting to $250, as a rough worth, not a bill). The two summary cards show total hours and total estimated value, and a Time Distribution pie chart visualizes the breakdown. Filter by date range and user, and export to Excel or PDF.

Estimation Accuracy

The Estimation Accuracy report compares the time you estimated a task would take against the time it actually took, so you can see whether your firm’s estimates run consistently high, consistently low, or land close, and budget the next matter accordingly. Because reading this one well takes a little interpretation (the difference between finishing faster than planned and blowing past an estimate matters), it has its own walkthrough.

See The Estimation Accuracy Report for how to read the per-person error rates and the scatter chart of estimate versus actual.

Who Can See These Reports

Productivity reports show how individuals spend their time, so access is kept to the people who manage the work, not shared firm-wide. Your Owner and Administrator always have access to every report. Beyond that, all five Productivity reports, Utilization Rate, User Productivity, Time by Category, Time by Activity Type, and Estimation Accuracy, are available to your legal staff (attorneys, paralegals, and legal secretaries) and to your office manager, the people responsible for billing, workload, and how the firm’s time is spent.

If a report doesn’t appear for someone, it’s almost always because their role isn’t on this list. Keeping productivity detail to the people who manage the work is deliberate, not an oversight.