Home / tools / overservicing calculator
free over-servicing calculator
How much unbilled work are you giving away for free?
Most professional services firms are running with phantom employees on their payroll. They are not real people. They are the cumulative ubilled hours your team delivers across every client, retainer and project, adding up to the equivalent of entire jobs your business is paying salaries for, but never billing.
How Magnetic stops over-servicing in real time
With Magnetic, scope and actual hours sit side by side on every project from day one, so the people running the work can see what is going off track and raise a change order based on real numbers.
%202.svg){kind=icon}
How the unbilled work FTE calculation works
No hidden assumptions. or proprietary index - just the four equations the calculator runs on your inputs.
worked example
a creative agency
annual cash given away
1,620 x £90 = 145, 800
Why 1,720 hours? 1,720 hours is realistic annual billable capacity for a full-time employee - 40 hours a week across roughtly 43 working weeks, after holidays, sick days, training and internal admin are stripped out. Using the theoretical 2,080 hours per year would understate the employee count by about 20%
Phantom Employee = Unbilled Work FTE
your phantom employee is the metaphor. Your unbilled work FTE is the technical term. Both describe the same thing the full time equivalent of all the unbilled work your team delivers every month.
This is where revenue leakage lives in services firms.
Five places phantom employees come from
scope creep
extra revision rounds
unpaid meetings
missing timesheets
"quick favours"
What Phantom employees look like in your sector
The same revenue leakage pattern shows up differently depending on the type of professional services firm
creative & Marketing
Scope creep on retainers
Retained expand as clients add stakeholders, "quick" requests, and extra revision rounds. The phantom employee count is usually higher than founders expect - over-servicing has been normalised into the culture.
typical leak:
0.8 - 1.4 phantom employees per agency
Consutling
Project bloat without change orders
Unbilled work hides in fixed-fee engagements that go past their scope and in pre-sales effort that never gets charged. Phantom employees compound on long engagements with senior staff.
typical leak:
0.6-1.1 phantom employees per firm
Accounting & legal
Missing time entries
Every missed time entry is unbilled work. Matters that span multiple months accumulate untracked admin and client communication. WIP that should have been invoiced sits in draft.
typical leak:
0.4 - 0.9 Phantom employees per practice
engineering & architecture
Mixed billing models
Time-and-materials, fixed-fee, retainer - mixed billing makes over-servicing harder to spot. Out-of-scope changes get absorbed into the next phase rather than raised as variations.
typical leak:
0.7 - 1.2 Phantom employees per firm
In-house & shared services
Over-utilisation witout chargeback
Without charge-back visbility, over-utilisation shows up as burnout, not as a number on a report. The team delivery significantly more work that its normal capaicty and the business never sees it costed
typical leak:
1.0 - 2.0 FTE's of unbilled internal work
Stop paying salaries for an unbilled work FTE you never invoice
Magnetic replaces the disconnected tools and spreadsheets with one system. CRM, projects, resources, timesheets, finance and reporting in a single system. Over-servicing surfaces in real time. Margins are visible per client. The team works against a single source of truth instead of guessing.
Millions of professional services firms trust Magnetic to reduce overservicing and improve visibility
Real stories from teams transforming workflows with Magnetic.
