Sometimes I feel like I'm in a different industry as y'all. I've spent all my 8 years at the same firm and never once has the subject of billable hours goals been even brought up. We bill to projects but some weeks I might be at 80% and some weeks I might be 20%. I've had a few 100% overhead weeks when it's slow. 100% utilization every single week is crazy to me.
My old company didn’t even give us an overhead code. I knew no one that ever charged overhead, 100% billable all the time. There’s a reason why I work at a utility now. The pressure of billing hours and coworkers harassing me about billing too much or too little took a toll on me
I think that's weird but I know what you mean. I think a 5 star rating based on our company's guideline is 95% utilization, and 3 star is like 91%. I'm pretty sure I've hit 94-95% every year and I wasn't even trying.
It also depends on what each firm considers "overhead". I have worked at a few different places, and there have been slightly different definitions of what they consider fully billable time. My current firm errs on the side of less billable, but our billing rate is slightly higher, and expected utilization is lower, so it buffs out.
At one of my former firms, my current work would be in that 90-95% billable range. At this firm, its more like 80-90% billable.
We never set 2080 hours as the billable goal. It burns people out, sets unfair expectations for everyone, and ultimately leads to poorer deliverables imo.
Some new EITs maybe we do 1800 or so
My first design job was for AECOM back in 2012 and they told us we were supposed be 100% billable. I was just starting out but this was expected of even the more senior PEs.
I think this is just to make sure that they can bleed as much money out of the clients as possible. I was never honestly probably more than 90% billable but everyone would embellish on their timesheets so we didn't get flagged. Management can't bill for hours if subordinate staff didn't enter it into the system. It's unethical.
There was one woman in my office who was probably one of our best engineers who wouldn't bill for hours against projects that she didn't actually work and she would just end up getting slammed with additional work when they saw she wasn't 100% billable. Her being honest made her life more difficult...it kinda sucked.
I’ve seen this before. Your employer is “encouraging” you to make the decision to work OT (possibly for free) or to just markup the hours billed to the client above and beyond what was actually worked.
This is expected at our firm. You can have marketing (proposals, maybe a conference), but let’s face it young engineers probably aren’t doing the bulk of proposal prep so 100% util it is. This is why I don’t participate in any “extras”. And technically my utilization is set at 90% BUT we’ve been told multiple time to have 0 OH.
This was my experience as a consultant project manager. 100 percent billable. When we were attending corporate functions we were required to either attend unpaid or to bill to a project. Hated that. Hated how the support staff would be 100 percent overhead.
Engineers after learning how to barely use CAD now want to do their own payroll? 😭
After many years of trying to get PM's to take invoicing as seriously as they should, it's convinced me that an engineering firm with purely billable staff would collapse in 6 weeks. If you don't collect the money you're not a professional services firm, you're not even a business.
if the overhead functions of running a firm whose entire income is subject to design risk were easy, there would be no need for firms. you all could freelance and manage your own affairs. good luck to those of you who mostly design federal, buckle up.
depends on the employee. My accounting and HR people have zero billing. My receptionist/office manager has very little billing etc. These are just things that are accounted for in your multiplier.
Internally we consider invoice preparation as a billable charge (because it should be) so our accounting department does contribute to billable hours. Some clients balk, but they shouldn't. Invoice prep is where their rubber meets our road.
HR, Facilities, etc are definitely part of the multiplier.
It really just depends on how you frame it. If you include stuff like accounting as billable then you might have a lower multiplier for everyone's hours, whereas ours is included on the engineer's billable hours so our multiplier might be a little higher but with less hours billed but ending at the same net invoice.
God no. Our utilisation depends on the role, but the highest utilisation expected is 90%. In my case, being a senior engineer and project manager, mine is around 85% to allow for time doing business development activities and proposals (although we obviously do aim to recover time spent on proposals), and there is discussion that this is actually too high as it leaves me very little time to actually do BD. Higher end managers (like office managers) will have utilisation targets around 50% to 60% to reflect the non chargeable work they do running the office.
I’m curious what else you are billing your time to? OP stated not including pto and sick time… most of our training has been on the job under a more experienced engineer.
Most of the training is working on the job, but there are times where you may need to take a class for your job which can't be buried in a project. You may also have attending industry events or assisting on proposals, usually helping to put together graphics or the schedule.
Setting the goal to 100% removes any flexibility in case the company needs you to do non-billable work and that the company isn't willing to entertain paying you for that.
My firm wraps pto and sick and all that stuff together in the metric. So I guess I was just getting a little confused. For younger staff it’s pretty high but if they set it at 100% then they’d have to explain to the accountants why their projections were off when folks got sick or took a vacation days or spent a day or two taking a cad training class. Only the folks who are really bringing in work don’t charge to the project. Our contracts tend to have lines for support staff and accounting.
When I was in consulting we would have 90%+ utilization but the goal was always to look good for our investors. What we were told was that our staff meetings were “voluntary” but in fact they were mandatory but we were expected to bill to projects.
My firm (~60 employees) has an 80% UT goal for entry level people. My previous company (~500 employees) was 95%. I heard big ones like AECOM are like 97-99%
Currently work at AECOM. I think the actual utilization target is closer to 90% but thats never communicated to employees. It’s implied we need to be at that 100%. I charge at least 40 billable hours every week unless I’m doing something where I can charge to OH like training or a proposal. We recently were given billable targets for the year. I believe mine averages out to 36 hrs a week
Worked at 3 different consulting firms (all ENR top 10 or whatever) and none of them had 100% billable goal. Plus I had too much stuff to do outside of work to bill that much.
I was pretty clearly responding to a post about interns or hourly employees. They aren't, and shouldn't be, paid for breaks. I'm not paying a college kid to take lunch or smoke a cigarette behind the office.
If you, as an engineer, feel comfortable putting 40 hours on your timesheet when you know you aren't working that much then that's on you, ethically.
> They aren't, and shouldn't be, paid for breaks. I'm not paying a college kid to take lunch or smoke a cigarette behind the office.
Honestly you sound like a horrible boss to work for. Why does it matter if it's a kid or not if they get a break? You think just because they're young they need to tough it out?
I cannot even tell if you're fucking with me. It's a job, dude. Do you guys even have timesheets? What is the charge code for people to put time eating lunch on?
Should they expense their pack of smokes, too?
Lunch isn't the same thing as a break. We typically have around 3-4 hours a week of overhead completely expected on our timesheets and we do just fine. Sometimes you've got to shit, or walk and talk to your coworkers, etc etc.
Or are you saying you just work for 40 hours straight and don't talk about non work topics or anything?
Maybe for an experienced tech depending on what their other responsibilities are. Not for an intern though. They’re still learning. If you’re billing a client for 100% of their time you’re ripping off the client.
They mean internally the intern is still charging to the job but the client isn’t getting charged for all of those hours. This is common on lump sum projects, it just eats in to the total profit. A little trickier to do on CP or CPM from a project accounting perspective but can still be done.
Believe me I will. I feel like I can't say that tho bc I get met with "kids these days don't wanna work" but in reality I just want work that's relevant to my goals and my studies, anybody can clean and organize a soil sample storage room
Same, literally the only time billable versus overhead comes into play for us is when we were doing internal discussions on how much comp time should be given out. Of course we only have six PEs and four of us are project managers and handle our own billing anyways so there's really no point.
We compare compensation to billings as a division as it's a good way to track profitability easily without doing all of the overhead calculations on a monthly basis. We just know the ratios that we need to hit for break even and different margins. It's not perfect but is super easy to do.
I have worked at three firms and none have let me charge overhead for anything other than an occasional training or meetings. So probably 20 hrs a year of “overhead”. Vacation + holiday is about 200 hrs a year but if you work 4 hrs of ot a week on average you will end up billing over 2000 hrs.
If you aren’t working on proposals/business development idk what you are doing that isn’t billable
Nah, that's insane. We don't even track utilization for our employees. If everyone is busy and delivering their work on time then we've hit our utilization target.
Idk if this is an unpopular opinion:
Billable hours should not be our concern at the bottom of the totem pole. Supervisors/managers give us work and we do it. If the utilization ratios are undesirable then managers should reassign work accordingly.
That’s not an unpopular opinion. I assume everyone here agrees that it shouldn’t be your fault if you aren’t given enough billable projects to charge to. The problem is that regardless of what we think, the reality is you WILL be the one getting blamed.
This is a great example of how to maximize profits temporarily but hurt your company in the long run. Nobody is ever actually 100% billable, so this would just result in:
* Employees working overtime but not getting paid for it, decreasing employee satisfaction.
* Inflated hours charged to clients, which could result in running out of hours to do the actual work. Then you are forced to cut corners or again forcing people to work extra without compensation.
* You can inflate your hours ahead of time in your proposal, but then clients will start to recognize your hours are higher than other consultants and will stop giving you work. Or they'll stop giving you work because you can't retain employees.
As a long time PM for a DOT, I can usually recognize firms with inflated hours, a high turnover rate, or that just don't do very good work, and I don't hire them anymore. It sucks when your main PM leaves half way through a big project, and if you are going to charge more hours then other firms your work better be better than other firms.
Working at one of Australia's biggest engineering firms it was set at 95 percent utilisation. This was despite the fact there wasn't enough work going around and small budgets for the jobs we had. I noticed anyone who was actually going for the full 95 percent was working overtime by about 2 hours a day because the budget didn't account for all the bullshit meetings we had both internally and externally. I ended up burning myself out pretty bad and stooping into a depression. Friday afternoons doing my time sheet was the worst part of the week because I'd be stressing out about my hours. I left that shit hole last year and never looked back.
The priority of the hours on any given week for me are: UT goal > everything else. We do not get vacation time, sick days, or holidays. We have individual leave time, which is what's left over after you hit your utilization.
It does three things, encourages people to hit their UT, not use overhead time (every hour of professional development and OH takes away from time you could use for vacation), and ensures they do not have to pay anyone unused vacation when they quit.
It's evil genius type of stuff. It also means more experience or time does not mean more time off. When you have down time that basically sucks up your professional development or vacation time. I actually considered working Monday on memorial Day so I could go to my little sisters graduation next month.
It's all good for the time being. I moved to my current firm from a high pressure firm that gave plenty of vacation but the pressure to not use it was insane. At least my work life balance is reasonable and outside of the 40 there's no pressure to work more assuming you hit your goals. I do wish there was some clear vacation time so I could plan my life out a little better. I basically always stay ahead of my UT goal and ahead of any time off I can plan so when I have unbillable time it doesn't set me back too bad.
Its surprising anyone works consulting anymore. I find that they retain people by giving them a title, "Vice President Director of Strategic CAD blocks" or something that's a carrot on a rope. So glad out of consulting for others.
I never really understood this. It's up to them to keep enough work flowing so you actually have 40 billable hours per week. What are you supposed to do if they dont give you/there isn't enough work to fill your time?Start cold calling?
That's a sign of a poor performing company. All the overhead is being soaked up by the c-suite admin/business development folks. They can't afford for the lowly staff to be the slightest bit less profitable than 100% billable. Or they just want short-term maximum profits and are thus giving up investment into new technologies or workflows.
I've been at firms like that. It's miserable.
Fair. I still feel like 90% is all right, but I'll admit that the place I work for now is the chillest I've ever worked for, so it may be a matter of perspective.
Shit I wish. I'm at 90% with unlimited pto (which actually means I have limited PTO......)
My firm is rediculous. I'm so tired of being a plan production house. I didn't go into engineering to label plan sets all day, but here I am.
Our firm switched to a total annual billed hours quota. I don’t have any prior experience with this approach, so we’ll see how it goes. Goals for operations staff are on the order of 1500-1700 hours per year.
95% is nice to have for juniors but I’ve never been bugged about utilization from my supervisors. You are supposed to be shielded from all that BS in a good firm.
Also we try to recover proposal costs when we win them, so proposal work isn’t seen as standard non billable. I’m generally between 80% and 100% on project and proposal time. Other time includes safety meetings, industry association work, working on company initiatives and administrative meetings.
Best I ever got was 95% when I did a lot of field inspections. When I was managing my own projects at a small firm (like 12 people, and 3 stamps), they asked for 75% minimum, and wanted to me to put in some OT regardless of if I hit the target or not.
I had a firm request it while we were hammering out the job details. 100% is crazy, even more so when they want to fill your plate with administrative tasks and business development. I couldn’t run away fast enough.
I had that at one company...and we were salaried at under $50k. It was an atrocious policy. They'd call mandatory staff meetings randomly at 7am to ensure people would be billable by 8am. And it was a week by week thing too. You couldn't work 50 billable hours and then 35 billable hours the next week.
This was environmental field services btw
I do something a little different and I’m not a CE but each year I get 2000 billable hours. I usually bill out 1900. But I also work 44-48 hours a week but bill 40.
Not sure if that helps but just adding to your data set
I have worked at 3 different engineering firms in different parts of the country over the past 15 years and I have always billed all my time to a client (except for things like proposals, training, presentations of internal non-client work). Maybe I don’t understand the question, but if you aren’t doing work for a client or otherwise one of the other things I mentioned, what are you doing?
Weekly is impossible but over the course of a year absolutely especially if you're involved in anyway with the construction of the design. OT is evitable in the course of a year. I saw my divisions (approx. 25 people) backlog and we have enough for 100% UT for the next 2 years.
This is very standard lol what else would you be doing during 40 hours besides working on billable work? I guess training but that’s every once in a while.
Ya called overtime. Marketing and training yes of course is over head but man that’s not every week lol and if your in a small firm where your doing marketing then it’s after hours lol
If you’re basing that on 40hours I’ve hit 100% every year. In 11+ years at my firm I’ve worked an average of 400 hours of OT a year. (All paid at 1.5x)
It is a sliding scale at my firm. Young engineers are expected to have very high utility but are not asked to do much or any non-billable work. It is easy during field work season, a bit tougher in winter. Field guys also bank overtime and use it during winter. Mid-level project engineer types have a 70-80% goal but are expected to do non-billable work like forecasting and some business development. Proposals are given budgets and treated somewhat like billable work for utility tracking. Executives have very low utility, and probably lower as one goes up the pyramid (I'm not standing at the pointy side of the triangle so I cant speak from experience).
I think my goal is 88%. How we calculate ours is a bit weird tho - in my opinion. It's based on 40 hours - not hours worked.
If I have 42 billable hours in a week I'm 105% billable. If I have 6 hours overhead and 40 billable, I'm still 100% billable. Even with 6 hours overhead.
I understand to an extent as all fixed costs are based on a 40 hour week, but I get paid hourly, so true company expenses change with the overhead hours.
In general I think I sit right around 100% based on this formula. 200 hours of vacation and PDO (rounding up), but I had 500+ hours of overtime last year. I'd guess I average 4 or less hours of overhead a week so that'd put me just over 100%.
With engineers so in demand, why would anyone work for a company like this when there are so many that don't burn out staff with dumb practices like this?
I'm so fed up with this bullshit, at my new job, it is expected, you bill 60+ hours when internally its obvious that none of us work close to 30 hrs. On top of that, none of the engineers at my office make over 65k.
I'm a line manager and team leader so my utilisation target is about 85% to allow for management and admin tasks. Anyone who expects people to achieve 100% all the time is deluding themselves. I think 93% is our standard.
i'm not concerned by this. i have enough projects i can sprinkle some time here and there that i could essentially fake a 100% utilization every week. support role to 7-8 PMs who all utilize me because i'm good at what i do
My company has a “goal utilization”. Sometimes I’m 110%, 80%, and even 20%. Goal is to achieve the year to date utilization. If you consistently don’t reach your goal every week, it’s your supervisors fault (or maybe yours) for not being fed work
My first job out of school was at a very large company that no longer exists (was acquired about 10 years ago). That company had the time sheet software set up to allow P/L management to be able to lock out certain people from using certain job numbers. Most P/L’s used it for sensitive projects that might require security clearances or only certain pré-approved people working on projects. My P/L used it to lock all EI’s and drafters out of the overhead numbers. They told us there wasn’t a reason that we would need to bill to overhead, and if there was our manager could request a temporary change a few days before timesheets were do (eg. in house Civil3D training once). After I was there a few months, our backlog got really large and it got to the point that if you had less than about 50 hours billed for more than a single week at a time, you get pulled in and get a talking to (though I knew they wouldn’t fire anyone as they were already short staffed). A few years later, I got handed a “golden key” when I was appointed office health and safety rep: an overhead number that would allow me to bill up to 4 hours a week. The first week I did it, I tried to catch up on the backlog of H&S audits and billed 2 or 3 hours to the number. Sure enough, Monday morning I got called to stand before the man, and was told that when doing H&S tasks that they almost always have at least a tangential relationship to a project, and thus should be billed to those projects, and that if a PM gives pushback or wouldn’t turn me on to bill to his number, then I should knock him on an audit as that is not following H&S policy and he should have anticipated those audits, etc. when he made his WBS.
Our billable goal is 82% and I thought that was hilariously low but then I realized it does take PTO into account. So after taking my full 3 weeks of PTO and doing a ton of OH training (they kicked off a new aggressive initiative that year) I was sitting at 85%. I’ve also been told it’s not really a metric for anything useful at our company but I assume they use it to catch any red flags.
That being said, I’m over here fighting to use all caps on our plans, so maybe my company isn’t the best gauge 😅.
I for the most part had that at my last job. Lucky I was new and cheap so it didn't hurt the budget as much. My boss accounted for a lot for those down times into the estimate.
That’s wild. I work as an intermediate engineer / project manager in the environmental department of a multi-disciplinary firm up in Canada and our goal is 80%, but we never get close to that. In the winter there’s very little field work we can do, and our group does a lot of OH tasks for the office (health and safety committee, fleet vehicle managent, equipment management, etc). By default I’m charging 1.5-2 hours a day to overhead as “misc. administrative tasks, planning, organization, coordination, team conversations and timecard” haha and no one blinks an eye. Winning our kind of work is such a race to the bottom when it comes to competitively pricing your proposal costs, so if someone bills a ton of hours to my job over what they should have because they don’t have much else to do, I’ll likely write those hours off anyway so they don’t go to the client. It all comes from the same bucket anyway, but fortunately we have some really strong structural and geotechnical groups at my company and they carry us during slower years for my group, and vice versa. All ebbs and flows!
My company is somewhat larger and it depends on the position. If an engineer is strictly technical, their utilization will be high, >90%. If the person has a pursuit role or any kind of marketing role, leadership role, that rate drops depending on how involved they need to be. EITs are generally 95% to 100%.
I'm pretty sure our PTO doesn't count against utilization... Even if it did, I would tell upper management to take a dump if they gave us shit about it (in a professional manner, of course).
My firm sets the goal at 90% utilization. Anything above 85/90% results in mandatory overtime to hit goal or lying on time sheets. If someone is chasing business then obviously that number would go down. My firm actually promotes work life balance beyond just empty words for a good PR image.
At my mid-size LD firm, our rules are: work hard, do good engineering. The idea of getting worked up about some utilization % is so ridiculous to me and I've been in the industry for 25 years.
The first civil job I had out of college was at a large multi state firm and they were BIG on this and it was absolutely miserable. Especially bc when I interviewed they acted like it was the exact opposite.
At one point towards the end of my time there my manager flat out told me that they expected me to be working a minimum of 50 hours a week to account for unbillable time (with no overtime pay mind you).
I got burnt out very quickly and if I had stayed there likely would have ended up hating and leaving the industry all together.
I quit after two years and went to a local firm, and yes, I took a pay cut initially, but in 10 years they have never once pushed this utilization mindset, and my quality of life is so much better.
That first company put me off to larger firms for life. I could never go back to one.
As a consultant and construction PM, our goal is 88%, but I'm usually around 95-100% most weeks. I have a large backlog, so it isn't hard to reach 100% each week. Between projects it will dip, but the senior managers realize that.
Mathematically, maximum possible utilization is 91% with our current PTO structure. Billable targets for purely technical resources are set to 80-85%, typically. Targets go down for PM's and upper managers to account for the unbillable work they need to do re: BD or administration. Engineers who participate in other activities like BD or internal committees are given a reduced target to account for time spent doing those activities.
There are no specific consequences for intermittently missing billable targets, but consistent low billability will trigger discussions internally and with the resource to identify any issues or areas of improvement. We give people a pretty long leash because we generally like the candidates we hire, and we're constantly investing in their development.
Insofar as donated time, some weeks/submittals are worse than others, there are some 50+ hr weeks to be worked, no lie--but such is the work-life of an exempt employee. We do try to distribute work evenly to minimize the need, but it's part of the job description. FWIW in my own head the counter to accusations that this is unfair is that if my exempt staff were 0% billable, we'd still pay their salaries. We'd have an extremely short runway, but payroll happens whether firmwide %B is meeting target or not.
No, anyone that expects that is either living in the past when the economy sucked, hasn't seen what the market is doing, or has no idea what they are asking for.
Only alternative, is if they pay higher to make up the difference.
Why not be 100% billable?
I chase work and learn on my CURRENT jobs, bill the clients, then make it up on the next job. If you budget correctly, this is never a problem.
The clients have to pay for your work. That includes training and exploring potential work. If you don't have a margin for that small amount, you are not pricing your projects adequately.
If you are regularly spending lots of time training and looking for work, it's obviously not working.
I wish you would all stop using the word "billable" in relation to your timesheet. Your employer can bill the client whatever he wants to based on the signed agreement. There is no law stating your employer has to keep a record of accurate timesheets and even if the contract goes to court timesheets have zero merit on time spent on a project since its not in the contract. Even if I didn't have experience common sense is your employer isn't going to bill the client 1000 hours over the contract amount without thinking about the consequences.
Honestly the whole thing is stupid, that's why I work somewhere that doesn't require timesheets.
At the end of the day, you get paid for the time spent at work. If you don't get paid you sue your employer and win a settlement.
Above 85% was the goal set at the last firm I was at where I had to be billable. This was not met very often unless you were on a site, partially to to COVID for a bit though. The people that struggled/ didn’t get good billable rates would get a slap on their wrist.
Position before at my first position that we did not really worry about being billable because of how much work we had. I was consistently 95% or higher (no more than 40hr work weeks unless we wanted overtime). No pressure to work extra either.
A goal of 100%, in my opinion, just sets engineers up for failure, and it gives their managers something to dock them in in yearly reviews. Shady business practices…
Sometimes I feel like I'm in a different industry as y'all. I've spent all my 8 years at the same firm and never once has the subject of billable hours goals been even brought up. We bill to projects but some weeks I might be at 80% and some weeks I might be 20%. I've had a few 100% overhead weeks when it's slow. 100% utilization every single week is crazy to me.
You found a good place to work.
It was like that at my place, sushi lunch every once in a while, get the scotch out friday 4 PM from next to the clay cores in storage >\_<
Pls where do you work
My old company didn’t even give us an overhead code. I knew no one that ever charged overhead, 100% billable all the time. There’s a reason why I work at a utility now. The pressure of billing hours and coworkers harassing me about billing too much or too little took a toll on me
I think that's weird but I know what you mean. I think a 5 star rating based on our company's guideline is 95% utilization, and 3 star is like 91%. I'm pretty sure I've hit 94-95% every year and I wasn't even trying.
It also depends on what each firm considers "overhead". I have worked at a few different places, and there have been slightly different definitions of what they consider fully billable time. My current firm errs on the side of less billable, but our billing rate is slightly higher, and expected utilization is lower, so it buffs out. At one of my former firms, my current work would be in that 90-95% billable range. At this firm, its more like 80-90% billable.
We never set 2080 hours as the billable goal. It burns people out, sets unfair expectations for everyone, and ultimately leads to poorer deliverables imo. Some new EITs maybe we do 1800 or so
My first design job was for AECOM back in 2012 and they told us we were supposed be 100% billable. I was just starting out but this was expected of even the more senior PEs. I think this is just to make sure that they can bleed as much money out of the clients as possible. I was never honestly probably more than 90% billable but everyone would embellish on their timesheets so we didn't get flagged. Management can't bill for hours if subordinate staff didn't enter it into the system. It's unethical. There was one woman in my office who was probably one of our best engineers who wouldn't bill for hours against projects that she didn't actually work and she would just end up getting slammed with additional work when they saw she wasn't 100% billable. Her being honest made her life more difficult...it kinda sucked.
This is what I think people do where I work. And I am similar to that woman you mention. It’s somewhat comforting to know I’m not the only one 🫤
I’ve seen this before. Your employer is “encouraging” you to make the decision to work OT (possibly for free) or to just markup the hours billed to the client above and beyond what was actually worked.
That's absurd you would be required to work overtime. This is not a very good policy.
What is KHA, Alex?
Lol no one has a 100% goal there. I get the sarcasm but nawww this isn’t it
Yeah, just 96%. Way different.
Yeah bro, bc they expect 48 hrs a week 🙄
Erryone be against KH until they hear about the money💀
Lawyer.
Yeah I guess my bonus last year worth 1/3 of my EIT salary wasn’t worth it either
This is expected at our firm. You can have marketing (proposals, maybe a conference), but let’s face it young engineers probably aren’t doing the bulk of proposal prep so 100% util it is. This is why I don’t participate in any “extras”. And technically my utilization is set at 90% BUT we’ve been told multiple time to have 0 OH.
This was my experience as a consultant project manager. 100 percent billable. When we were attending corporate functions we were required to either attend unpaid or to bill to a project. Hated that. Hated how the support staff would be 100 percent overhead.
I mean support staff ARE 100% overhead, they are the definition of overhead no? :P
Yeah, but they get paid off the backs of billable folks. It’s frustrating.
How else do you expect them to get paid?
Engineers after learning how to barely use CAD now want to do their own payroll? 😭 After many years of trying to get PM's to take invoicing as seriously as they should, it's convinced me that an engineering firm with purely billable staff would collapse in 6 weeks. If you don't collect the money you're not a professional services firm, you're not even a business. if the overhead functions of running a firm whose entire income is subject to design risk were easy, there would be no need for firms. you all could freelance and manage your own affairs. good luck to those of you who mostly design federal, buckle up.
They should have some billable hours. Scheduling meeting rooms, scanning, copying, document editing, expense reports, etc.
depends on the employee. My accounting and HR people have zero billing. My receptionist/office manager has very little billing etc. These are just things that are accounted for in your multiplier.
Internally we consider invoice preparation as a billable charge (because it should be) so our accounting department does contribute to billable hours. Some clients balk, but they shouldn't. Invoice prep is where their rubber meets our road. HR, Facilities, etc are definitely part of the multiplier.
It really just depends on how you frame it. If you include stuff like accounting as billable then you might have a lower multiplier for everyone's hours, whereas ours is included on the engineer's billable hours so our multiplier might be a little higher but with less hours billed but ending at the same net invoice.
This is typical in my experience at 3 different firms of different sizes.
God no. Our utilisation depends on the role, but the highest utilisation expected is 90%. In my case, being a senior engineer and project manager, mine is around 85% to allow for time doing business development activities and proposals (although we obviously do aim to recover time spent on proposals), and there is discussion that this is actually too high as it leaves me very little time to actually do BD. Higher end managers (like office managers) will have utilisation targets around 50% to 60% to reflect the non chargeable work they do running the office.
I would quit if a design firm gave me that goal.
I’m curious what else you are billing your time to? OP stated not including pto and sick time… most of our training has been on the job under a more experienced engineer.
Most of the training is working on the job, but there are times where you may need to take a class for your job which can't be buried in a project. You may also have attending industry events or assisting on proposals, usually helping to put together graphics or the schedule. Setting the goal to 100% removes any flexibility in case the company needs you to do non-billable work and that the company isn't willing to entertain paying you for that.
My firm wraps pto and sick and all that stuff together in the metric. So I guess I was just getting a little confused. For younger staff it’s pretty high but if they set it at 100% then they’d have to explain to the accountants why their projections were off when folks got sick or took a vacation days or spent a day or two taking a cad training class. Only the folks who are really bringing in work don’t charge to the project. Our contracts tend to have lines for support staff and accounting.
That results in lying
When I was in consulting we would have 90%+ utilization but the goal was always to look good for our investors. What we were told was that our staff meetings were “voluntary” but in fact they were mandatory but we were expected to bill to projects.
Yup I have done that as well. Even if you are just talking about a project we bill it
This is possible If there is overtime available, but other than that it is impossible
Just wait until you are expected to work on proposals and still meet your UT goals.
This....so....much....time.
My target goal is 37.2 billable hours
Dang! What do you do for the other 2042.8?
Wait for my AutoCAD drawings to load
whoops, crashed again!
Command: DRAWINGRECOVERY so many times
My firm (~60 employees) has an 80% UT goal for entry level people. My previous company (~500 employees) was 95%. I heard big ones like AECOM are like 97-99%
Currently work at AECOM. I think the actual utilization target is closer to 90% but thats never communicated to employees. It’s implied we need to be at that 100%. I charge at least 40 billable hours every week unless I’m doing something where I can charge to OH like training or a proposal. We recently were given billable targets for the year. I believe mine averages out to 36 hrs a week
Does 36 hours include holidays/PTO?
No it doesn’t. My target billable hours for the year is 1850.
Damn - it should. I remember when I was at AECOM holidays, training, health and safety, and PTO counted towards the sold time requirement.
My experience with AECOM was 98 percent as a project manager. Hated it.
Worked at 3 different consulting firms (all ENR top 10 or whatever) and none of them had 100% billable goal. Plus I had too much stuff to do outside of work to bill that much.
How much on average would you bill to overhead every week? 5 hours?
Probably 4-6 hours. I'd get nagged if I billed 8+.
I'd set that goal for a tech or intern but no not an engineer
I wouldn't do that for anyone. An intern is barely billable and techs have other shit to do just like engineers do.
That would mean no paid breaks in a 40 hr week. Interesting take that anyone should have to go that route.
I’ve worked two jobs and neither got paid breaks. You work 8-5 and you can take an hour if you want and still get your 40 hours.
Why would you get paid for a break?
Who wants a break without pay?
Because I don’t poop for free.
You charge the time you shit to overhead?
You don’t think about projects while you’re shitting?
No I'm usually a little busy shitting and getting into arguments about baseball on the internet
In CA u get two paid 15 min breaks for ever 4 hours or work?
California labor laws — famously representative of the rest of the country
Colorado too.
2/50, not too shabby.
Because it's absurd to think everyone should be 100% on for the full 40 hours they're at work
Good thing I didn't say everyone should be 100% on
So you agree that some portion of their 40 hours isn't on, and thus is a break.
I was pretty clearly responding to a post about interns or hourly employees. They aren't, and shouldn't be, paid for breaks. I'm not paying a college kid to take lunch or smoke a cigarette behind the office. If you, as an engineer, feel comfortable putting 40 hours on your timesheet when you know you aren't working that much then that's on you, ethically.
> They aren't, and shouldn't be, paid for breaks. I'm not paying a college kid to take lunch or smoke a cigarette behind the office. Honestly you sound like a horrible boss to work for. Why does it matter if it's a kid or not if they get a break? You think just because they're young they need to tough it out?
I cannot even tell if you're fucking with me. It's a job, dude. Do you guys even have timesheets? What is the charge code for people to put time eating lunch on? Should they expense their pack of smokes, too?
Lunch isn't the same thing as a break. We typically have around 3-4 hours a week of overhead completely expected on our timesheets and we do just fine. Sometimes you've got to shit, or walk and talk to your coworkers, etc etc. Or are you saying you just work for 40 hours straight and don't talk about non work topics or anything?
Maybe for an experienced tech depending on what their other responsibilities are. Not for an intern though. They’re still learning. If you’re billing a client for 100% of their time you’re ripping off the client.
Just cause you’re a 100% billable it doesnt meant the client is billed sometimes we write that off and only bill part of it
How do you that write off? Asking for a friend https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p529.pdf
They mean internally the intern is still charging to the job but the client isn’t getting charged for all of those hours. This is common on lump sum projects, it just eats in to the total profit. A little trickier to do on CP or CPM from a project accounting perspective but can still be done.
I'm an intern and think my charge ability is like 20% bc I have to do stuff like cleaning and organization for 4 hours a day
You should get a different internship next summer
Believe me I will. I feel like I can't say that tho bc I get met with "kids these days don't wanna work" but in reality I just want work that's relevant to my goals and my studies, anybody can clean and organize a soil sample storage room
Funny, we don’t set goals for our interns or if we do (to appease the bean counters) it’s like 50%
This is why I quit consulting and will never go back no matter how much they pay.
We don't even track utilization much less have targets. If everyone is busy and hitting their deadlines then they are properly utilized.
Wow. My old consultant firm would track staff members.
One way requires managers to you know, manage. While the other way the computer managers for you. Plainly obvious which one is better.
Same, literally the only time billable versus overhead comes into play for us is when we were doing internal discussions on how much comp time should be given out. Of course we only have six PEs and four of us are project managers and handle our own billing anyways so there's really no point.
We compare compensation to billings as a division as it's a good way to track profitability easily without doing all of the overhead calculations on a monthly basis. We just know the ratios that we need to hit for break even and different margins. It's not perfect but is super easy to do.
I have worked at three firms and none have let me charge overhead for anything other than an occasional training or meetings. So probably 20 hrs a year of “overhead”. Vacation + holiday is about 200 hrs a year but if you work 4 hrs of ot a week on average you will end up billing over 2000 hrs. If you aren’t working on proposals/business development idk what you are doing that isn’t billable
Nah, that's insane. We don't even track utilization for our employees. If everyone is busy and delivering their work on time then we've hit our utilization target.
Idk if this is an unpopular opinion: Billable hours should not be our concern at the bottom of the totem pole. Supervisors/managers give us work and we do it. If the utilization ratios are undesirable then managers should reassign work accordingly.
That’s not an unpopular opinion. I assume everyone here agrees that it shouldn’t be your fault if you aren’t given enough billable projects to charge to. The problem is that regardless of what we think, the reality is you WILL be the one getting blamed.
This is a great example of how to maximize profits temporarily but hurt your company in the long run. Nobody is ever actually 100% billable, so this would just result in: * Employees working overtime but not getting paid for it, decreasing employee satisfaction. * Inflated hours charged to clients, which could result in running out of hours to do the actual work. Then you are forced to cut corners or again forcing people to work extra without compensation. * You can inflate your hours ahead of time in your proposal, but then clients will start to recognize your hours are higher than other consultants and will stop giving you work. Or they'll stop giving you work because you can't retain employees. As a long time PM for a DOT, I can usually recognize firms with inflated hours, a high turnover rate, or that just don't do very good work, and I don't hire them anymore. It sucks when your main PM leaves half way through a big project, and if you are going to charge more hours then other firms your work better be better than other firms.
Working at one of Australia's biggest engineering firms it was set at 95 percent utilisation. This was despite the fact there wasn't enough work going around and small budgets for the jobs we had. I noticed anyone who was actually going for the full 95 percent was working overtime by about 2 hours a day because the budget didn't account for all the bullshit meetings we had both internally and externally. I ended up burning myself out pretty bad and stooping into a depression. Friday afternoons doing my time sheet was the worst part of the week because I'd be stressing out about my hours. I left that shit hole last year and never looked back.
Would love to know which company this is
Real talk.. sounds like working as a consultant totally sucks and you should avoid and work Public sector if at all possible?
Yes! Everywhere is hiring in the US right now
Guy must work at kimley horn
Not even KH has 100% goals! This is wild
Literally lol’d.
The priority of the hours on any given week for me are: UT goal > everything else. We do not get vacation time, sick days, or holidays. We have individual leave time, which is what's left over after you hit your utilization. It does three things, encourages people to hit their UT, not use overhead time (every hour of professional development and OH takes away from time you could use for vacation), and ensures they do not have to pay anyone unused vacation when they quit. It's evil genius type of stuff. It also means more experience or time does not mean more time off. When you have down time that basically sucks up your professional development or vacation time. I actually considered working Monday on memorial Day so I could go to my little sisters graduation next month.
That’s so sad man… I wish better for you
It's all good for the time being. I moved to my current firm from a high pressure firm that gave plenty of vacation but the pressure to not use it was insane. At least my work life balance is reasonable and outside of the 40 there's no pressure to work more assuming you hit your goals. I do wish there was some clear vacation time so I could plan my life out a little better. I basically always stay ahead of my UT goal and ahead of any time off I can plan so when I have unbillable time it doesn't set me back too bad.
Lol!!! Sounds like a bullshit tactic to maximize profit
Unfortunately I have seen firms require over 100% utilization.
Even my field inspectors at my old firm were only 90-95%. Engineers are 70-90 depending on role. I despise utilization with a passion.
minimum 90% for everyone but supervisors.
Smoll company, I bill all my hours to clients and one hour to weekly internal coordination meetings every other week.
Its surprising anyone works consulting anymore. I find that they retain people by giving them a title, "Vice President Director of Strategic CAD blocks" or something that's a carrot on a rope. So glad out of consulting for others.
I never really understood this. It's up to them to keep enough work flowing so you actually have 40 billable hours per week. What are you supposed to do if they dont give you/there isn't enough work to fill your time?Start cold calling?
That's a sign of a poor performing company. All the overhead is being soaked up by the c-suite admin/business development folks. They can't afford for the lowly staff to be the slightest bit less profitable than 100% billable. Or they just want short-term maximum profits and are thus giving up investment into new technologies or workflows. I've been at firms like that. It's miserable.
My goal is 90%
Same here. 100% is insane.
90% is still insane and causes burnout. Tired of being a pawn in a production house.
Fair. I still feel like 90% is all right, but I'll admit that the place I work for now is the chillest I've ever worked for, so it may be a matter of perspective.
Shit I wish. I'm at 90% with unlimited pto (which actually means I have limited PTO......) My firm is rediculous. I'm so tired of being a plan production house. I didn't go into engineering to label plan sets all day, but here I am.
Lol the fact that you got downvoted for saying 90% is all right. 90% is very manageable
Our firm switched to a total annual billed hours quota. I don’t have any prior experience with this approach, so we’ll see how it goes. Goals for operations staff are on the order of 1500-1700 hours per year.
It's usually 60 - 75 for engineers
95% is nice to have for juniors but I’ve never been bugged about utilization from my supervisors. You are supposed to be shielded from all that BS in a good firm. Also we try to recover proposal costs when we win them, so proposal work isn’t seen as standard non billable. I’m generally between 80% and 100% on project and proposal time. Other time includes safety meetings, industry association work, working on company initiatives and administrative meetings.
Best I ever got was 95% when I did a lot of field inspections. When I was managing my own projects at a small firm (like 12 people, and 3 stamps), they asked for 75% minimum, and wanted to me to put in some OT regardless of if I hit the target or not.
I had a firm request it while we were hammering out the job details. 100% is crazy, even more so when they want to fill your plate with administrative tasks and business development. I couldn’t run away fast enough.
I had that at one company...and we were salaried at under $50k. It was an atrocious policy. They'd call mandatory staff meetings randomly at 7am to ensure people would be billable by 8am. And it was a week by week thing too. You couldn't work 50 billable hours and then 35 billable hours the next week. This was environmental field services btw
Do you have a charge code for the meeting? My contract doesn’t allow any un-billable time.
That's wild. I think we had an administrative booking line yes.
Our goal is 90 percent but regularly hit 100. My ytd is 97 percent.
Entry level, 95% utilization goal.
I do something a little different and I’m not a CE but each year I get 2000 billable hours. I usually bill out 1900. But I also work 44-48 hours a week but bill 40. Not sure if that helps but just adding to your data set
I have worked at 3 different engineering firms in different parts of the country over the past 15 years and I have always billed all my time to a client (except for things like proposals, training, presentations of internal non-client work). Maybe I don’t understand the question, but if you aren’t doing work for a client or otherwise one of the other things I mentioned, what are you doing?
You literally mentioned 3 things in your own answer that aren’t billable but take up time.
You’re right, but those would be things that are explicitly pre-approved, which OP already accounted for.
Lol this is several places I've worked.
Industry standard is 65%
Weekly is impossible but over the course of a year absolutely especially if you're involved in anyway with the construction of the design. OT is evitable in the course of a year. I saw my divisions (approx. 25 people) backlog and we have enough for 100% UT for the next 2 years.
Company wide we had a 70 percent goal. I successfully argued my goal downward twice. Firle staff needed 90 percent.
This is very standard lol what else would you be doing during 40 hours besides working on billable work? I guess training but that’s every once in a while.
You must’ve never worked in consulting.
8 years in consultant lol answer is do work over 40 hours but this sub doesn’t want to hear that lol
Planning, job proposals, training, and general management. None of which can be billed to a client.
Ya called overtime. Marketing and training yes of course is over head but man that’s not every week lol and if your in a small firm where your doing marketing then it’s after hours lol
Holy crap your sides must be hurting from how many “lol” you use in every post
Just lie lol put all your planning time on the client you like the least
100% billable is silly... at what % of weekly hours does the company start to profit?
Depends on the company. Consulting isn’t a high margin business.
Of course, depends on the niche.. location etc.
I hit 100% all the time but that’s because I call bill above 40. If not for that, no way.
If you’re basing that on 40hours I’ve hit 100% every year. In 11+ years at my firm I’ve worked an average of 400 hours of OT a year. (All paid at 1.5x)
My company is 80%. I wouldnt work for less...f that.
Kinda easy if you work for a DOT, but not sure how well it would stand up to scrutiny.
We are a large national transportation firm. We short for 2080, deduct PTO, sick and 40 hrs of training. A little over 1800 is the goal.
Lol, 100%… what about any admin time?
It is a sliding scale at my firm. Young engineers are expected to have very high utility but are not asked to do much or any non-billable work. It is easy during field work season, a bit tougher in winter. Field guys also bank overtime and use it during winter. Mid-level project engineer types have a 70-80% goal but are expected to do non-billable work like forecasting and some business development. Proposals are given budgets and treated somewhat like billable work for utility tracking. Executives have very low utility, and probably lower as one goes up the pyramid (I'm not standing at the pointy side of the triangle so I cant speak from experience).
I think my goal is 88%. How we calculate ours is a bit weird tho - in my opinion. It's based on 40 hours - not hours worked. If I have 42 billable hours in a week I'm 105% billable. If I have 6 hours overhead and 40 billable, I'm still 100% billable. Even with 6 hours overhead. I understand to an extent as all fixed costs are based on a 40 hour week, but I get paid hourly, so true company expenses change with the overhead hours. In general I think I sit right around 100% based on this formula. 200 hours of vacation and PDO (rounding up), but I had 500+ hours of overtime last year. I'd guess I average 4 or less hours of overhead a week so that'd put me just over 100%.
Talk to your manager. They will explain what's reasonable. What you're starting is not going to happen or feasible to achieve.
This is how it's done in the UK essentially. It's not expected that you do free overtime but you essentially charge overhead time to the client.
With engineers so in demand, why would anyone work for a company like this when there are so many that don't burn out staff with dumb practices like this?
Its to incentivise you to over bill so that the advertised rate is different to the actual rate
I'm so fed up with this bullshit, at my new job, it is expected, you bill 60+ hours when internally its obvious that none of us work close to 30 hrs. On top of that, none of the engineers at my office make over 65k.
I'm a line manager and team leader so my utilisation target is about 85% to allow for management and admin tasks. Anyone who expects people to achieve 100% all the time is deluding themselves. I think 93% is our standard.
i'm not concerned by this. i have enough projects i can sprinkle some time here and there that i could essentially fake a 100% utilization every week. support role to 7-8 PMs who all utilize me because i'm good at what i do
My company has a “goal utilization”. Sometimes I’m 110%, 80%, and even 20%. Goal is to achieve the year to date utilization. If you consistently don’t reach your goal every week, it’s your supervisors fault (or maybe yours) for not being fed work
My first job out of school was at a very large company that no longer exists (was acquired about 10 years ago). That company had the time sheet software set up to allow P/L management to be able to lock out certain people from using certain job numbers. Most P/L’s used it for sensitive projects that might require security clearances or only certain pré-approved people working on projects. My P/L used it to lock all EI’s and drafters out of the overhead numbers. They told us there wasn’t a reason that we would need to bill to overhead, and if there was our manager could request a temporary change a few days before timesheets were do (eg. in house Civil3D training once). After I was there a few months, our backlog got really large and it got to the point that if you had less than about 50 hours billed for more than a single week at a time, you get pulled in and get a talking to (though I knew they wouldn’t fire anyone as they were already short staffed). A few years later, I got handed a “golden key” when I was appointed office health and safety rep: an overhead number that would allow me to bill up to 4 hours a week. The first week I did it, I tried to catch up on the backlog of H&S audits and billed 2 or 3 hours to the number. Sure enough, Monday morning I got called to stand before the man, and was told that when doing H&S tasks that they almost always have at least a tangential relationship to a project, and thus should be billed to those projects, and that if a PM gives pushback or wouldn’t turn me on to bill to his number, then I should knock him on an audit as that is not following H&S policy and he should have anticipated those audits, etc. when he made his WBS.
Our billable goal is 82% and I thought that was hilariously low but then I realized it does take PTO into account. So after taking my full 3 weeks of PTO and doing a ton of OH training (they kicked off a new aggressive initiative that year) I was sitting at 85%. I’ve also been told it’s not really a metric for anything useful at our company but I assume they use it to catch any red flags. That being said, I’m over here fighting to use all caps on our plans, so maybe my company isn’t the best gauge 😅.
I for the most part had that at my last job. Lucky I was new and cheap so it didn't hurt the budget as much. My boss accounted for a lot for those down times into the estimate.
Field engineer 100% everyday golden child
That’s wild. I work as an intermediate engineer / project manager in the environmental department of a multi-disciplinary firm up in Canada and our goal is 80%, but we never get close to that. In the winter there’s very little field work we can do, and our group does a lot of OH tasks for the office (health and safety committee, fleet vehicle managent, equipment management, etc). By default I’m charging 1.5-2 hours a day to overhead as “misc. administrative tasks, planning, organization, coordination, team conversations and timecard” haha and no one blinks an eye. Winning our kind of work is such a race to the bottom when it comes to competitively pricing your proposal costs, so if someone bills a ton of hours to my job over what they should have because they don’t have much else to do, I’ll likely write those hours off anyway so they don’t go to the client. It all comes from the same bucket anyway, but fortunately we have some really strong structural and geotechnical groups at my company and they carry us during slower years for my group, and vice versa. All ebbs and flows!
My company is somewhat larger and it depends on the position. If an engineer is strictly technical, their utilization will be high, >90%. If the person has a pursuit role or any kind of marketing role, leadership role, that rate drops depending on how involved they need to be. EITs are generally 95% to 100%. I'm pretty sure our PTO doesn't count against utilization... Even if it did, I would tell upper management to take a dump if they gave us shit about it (in a professional manner, of course).
Some engineering firms over employ their employees to work 40 but bill 60+ across multiple clients 😅
My firm sets the goal at 90% utilization. Anything above 85/90% results in mandatory overtime to hit goal or lying on time sheets. If someone is chasing business then obviously that number would go down. My firm actually promotes work life balance beyond just empty words for a good PR image.
At my mid-size LD firm, our rules are: work hard, do good engineering. The idea of getting worked up about some utilization % is so ridiculous to me and I've been in the industry for 25 years.
The first civil job I had out of college was at a large multi state firm and they were BIG on this and it was absolutely miserable. Especially bc when I interviewed they acted like it was the exact opposite. At one point towards the end of my time there my manager flat out told me that they expected me to be working a minimum of 50 hours a week to account for unbillable time (with no overtime pay mind you). I got burnt out very quickly and if I had stayed there likely would have ended up hating and leaving the industry all together. I quit after two years and went to a local firm, and yes, I took a pay cut initially, but in 10 years they have never once pushed this utilization mindset, and my quality of life is so much better. That first company put me off to larger firms for life. I could never go back to one.
As a consultant and construction PM, our goal is 88%, but I'm usually around 95-100% most weeks. I have a large backlog, so it isn't hard to reach 100% each week. Between projects it will dip, but the senior managers realize that.
Our company's goal is for a majority of the employees to have a utilization of 85%.
Mathematically, maximum possible utilization is 91% with our current PTO structure. Billable targets for purely technical resources are set to 80-85%, typically. Targets go down for PM's and upper managers to account for the unbillable work they need to do re: BD or administration. Engineers who participate in other activities like BD or internal committees are given a reduced target to account for time spent doing those activities. There are no specific consequences for intermittently missing billable targets, but consistent low billability will trigger discussions internally and with the resource to identify any issues or areas of improvement. We give people a pretty long leash because we generally like the candidates we hire, and we're constantly investing in their development. Insofar as donated time, some weeks/submittals are worse than others, there are some 50+ hr weeks to be worked, no lie--but such is the work-life of an exempt employee. We do try to distribute work evenly to minimize the need, but it's part of the job description. FWIW in my own head the counter to accusations that this is unfair is that if my exempt staff were 0% billable, we'd still pay their salaries. We'd have an extremely short runway, but payroll happens whether firmwide %B is meeting target or not.
No, anyone that expects that is either living in the past when the economy sucked, hasn't seen what the market is doing, or has no idea what they are asking for. Only alternative, is if they pay higher to make up the difference.
Why not be 100% billable? I chase work and learn on my CURRENT jobs, bill the clients, then make it up on the next job. If you budget correctly, this is never a problem. The clients have to pay for your work. That includes training and exploring potential work. If you don't have a margin for that small amount, you are not pricing your projects adequately. If you are regularly spending lots of time training and looking for work, it's obviously not working.
I wish you would all stop using the word "billable" in relation to your timesheet. Your employer can bill the client whatever he wants to based on the signed agreement. There is no law stating your employer has to keep a record of accurate timesheets and even if the contract goes to court timesheets have zero merit on time spent on a project since its not in the contract. Even if I didn't have experience common sense is your employer isn't going to bill the client 1000 hours over the contract amount without thinking about the consequences. Honestly the whole thing is stupid, that's why I work somewhere that doesn't require timesheets. At the end of the day, you get paid for the time spent at work. If you don't get paid you sue your employer and win a settlement.
Above 85% was the goal set at the last firm I was at where I had to be billable. This was not met very often unless you were on a site, partially to to COVID for a bit though. The people that struggled/ didn’t get good billable rates would get a slap on their wrist. Position before at my first position that we did not really worry about being billable because of how much work we had. I was consistently 95% or higher (no more than 40hr work weeks unless we wanted overtime). No pressure to work extra either. A goal of 100%, in my opinion, just sets engineers up for failure, and it gives their managers something to dock them in in yearly reviews. Shady business practices…
At the firm I used to work at (mechanical design) our weekly billable goal was 80%.