Improving time-tracking accuracy for PR agencies managing campaign deliverables

Key takeaways

• Accurate time tracking is non-negotiable for PR agency profitability. Without it, you're pricing in the dark and eroding your margins on every press release, media pitch, and campaign report.
• Integrate your time tracking directly with project management tools. This creates a single source of truth for what was planned versus what was actually spent on each campaign deliverable.
• Use labour cost analysis to understand your true cost of delivery. Multiply tracked hours by your fully-loaded staff costs to see the real profit or loss on each client and activity.
• Track efficiency metrics like utilisation and realisation rates. These numbers tell you if your team is busy on billable work and if you're getting paid for all the time they spend.
• Better data leads to better pricing and scope management. Accurate historical time data is your most powerful tool for setting profitable retainers and pushing back on scope creep.

Why is PR agency time tracking accuracy so critical for profitability?

PR agency time tracking accuracy is the single most important piece of data for knowing if you're making money. Your profitability lives in the gap between what you charge a client and what it costs you to deliver the work. For PR agencies, that cost is almost entirely people's time.

Think about a typical retainer. You agree to a set monthly fee for media relations, content creation, and reporting. If your team spends 50 hours on that client but you only tracked 40, you've just worked 10 hours for free. Your margin on that client disappears.

In our experience working with PR agencies, this is the most common financial leak. The work is often reactive, creative, and collaborative. Time slips through the cracks on quick calls, rewriting pitches, or managing a crisis. Without tight tracking, you can't see the leak.

Accurate data transforms guesswork into strategy. It shows you which clients are profitable, which services drain resources, and where your pricing is too low. It turns your team's effort from an abstract concept into a measurable, manageable cost.

How do most PR agencies get time tracking wrong?

Most PR agencies treat time tracking as an administrative chore, not a commercial tool. Team members log time weekly from memory, often rounding up or down. They use generic categories like "client work" instead of tagging time to specific deliverables like "draft press release" or "media list research".

This creates garbage data. If you can't see how long it actually takes to secure a top-tier feature, your next proposal will be a guess. You'll either underprice and lose money, or overprice and lose the pitch.

Another major mistake is not connecting time to cost. Tracking 10 hours is one thing. Understanding that those 10 hours cost you £750 in salaries, benefits, and overheads is another. Without that labour cost analysis, you're not tracking profit, you're just tracking activity.

The final common error is a culture problem. Leadership doesn't champion the importance of accurate data. Team members see it as micromanagement rather than a way to protect the agency's health and their own job security. Changing this mindset is the first step to improvement.

What project management tools work best for PR agency workflows?

The right project management tools make accurate tracking effortless by building it into daily work. Look for tools that allow you to create tasks linked to specific campaign deliverables and have built-in timers. Popular choices include Asana, ClickUp, and Monday.com, often integrated with dedicated time-tracking apps like Harvest or Clockify.

The key is to mirror your actual workflow. Create a project for each client campaign. Inside that, have tasks for each deliverable: "Q1 Media Audit," "Draft CEO Byline Article," "Pitch to Tech Journalists." When a team member starts work, they start the timer on that specific task. The time is captured automatically against the right client and the right type of work.

This approach kills two birds with one stone. It manages the project and captures the cost data simultaneously. You can see in real-time if you're burning through the budgeted hours for "event coordination" faster than planned, allowing you to adjust before the retainer is blown.

Using these project management tools also provides visual proof of work. You can show clients a high-level timeline of completed deliverables, which builds trust and justifies your fees. It turns your internal process into a client-facing asset.

How do you perform a labour cost analysis with time tracking data?

Labour cost analysis means converting tracked hours into pounds and pence. First, calculate your fully-loaded cost per hour for each team member. Don't just use their salary. Include employer NIC, pension contributions, benefits, and a share of office and software costs.

For example, a PR executive with a £45,000 salary might have a true hourly cost of £35. If they spend 5 hours on a client report, the labour cost is £175. If your retainer only allocated £150 for reporting that month, you've lost £25 before any other costs.

Do this for every client and every service line. You might discover that "crisis communications" has a 60% gross margin (the money left after paying your team) while "social media management" only has 35%. This tells you where to focus your business development and where to increase prices.

Specialist accountants for PR agencies can help you set up these calculations correctly. They ensure you're capturing all costs and interpreting the data to make smart commercial decisions, not just generating more spreadsheets.

What efficiency metrics should PR agencies track?

Track three core efficiency metrics: utilisation rate, realisation rate, and average cost per deliverable. Your utilisation rate is the percentage of your team's paid time spent on billable client work. Aim for 70-80%. Lower means too much internal time; higher risks burnout.

Realisation rate is even more telling. It's the percentage of tracked billable time that you actually invoice and collect payment for. If your team logs 100 billable hours but you only charge for 80, your realisation rate is 80%. The missing 20% is often scope creep or write-downs.

Average cost per deliverable is your secret weapon for pricing. How much does it truly cost to produce one press release, one media list, or one monthly report? Divide your total labour cost for that service by the number of deliverables. This gives you a rock-solid cost base to build your price upon.

Monitoring these efficiency metrics monthly gives you an early warning system. A dropping realisation rate signals scope creep. A rising cost per deliverable signals inefficiency. You can act before it hits your profit.

How can better time tracking improve client proposals and retainers?

Historical time data is your most powerful tool for pricing new work. When pitching for a retainer, you can move from "we think it will take about 20 hours a month" to "based on our analysis of three similar clients, this scope requires 28 hours of senior consultant time and 15 hours of executive time per month."

This confidence wins business. Clients respect data-driven proposals. It also protects you. When a client asks for "just one more" press release, you can refer to the agreed scope and the data showing that additional releases add 5 hours of cost. You can choose to provide it as a paid add-on.

For existing retainers, use time tracking to conduct quarterly reviews. Show the client the value delivered: "This quarter, we dedicated 65 hours to your account, achieving 12 pieces of coverage with an average domain authority of 75." This reinforces the partnership and provides a natural opportunity to discuss scope adjustments if the work has increased.

To turn your time-tracking data into a clear picture of agency profitability, take the Agency Profit Score — a free 5-minute assessment that reveals how well you're tracking financial health across profit visibility, revenue pipelines, cash flow, and operations. It helps you understand where retainer profitability stands and what to focus on next.

What are the practical steps to improve time tracking accuracy this month?

Start with a simple, focused pilot. Pick one active client campaign and one project management tool. Work with the team to break the campaign into every discrete deliverable and create tasks for each. Mandate that all time for that client is logged via the tool's timer that week.

At the week's end, review the data together. Not to punish, but to learn. Was the estimate for "media outreach" accurate? Did unplanned "client revisions" take longer than expected? This review makes the data relevant to the team's daily work.

Then, calculate the labour cost for that week. Show the team the link between their logged hours and the agency's income. This builds commercial awareness and helps them understand why accuracy matters for everyone's success.

Finally, scale what works. Roll out the process to another campaign, then another client. Choose a primary tool and make it part of your agency's standard operating procedure. The goal is to make accurate tracking a normal, invisible part of doing great PR work.

How does accurate time tracking protect against scope creep?

Scope creep is the silent killer of PR agency margins. It's the extra calls, the additional report revisions, the "quick questions" that add up. Accurate time tracking makes scope creep visible. You can see exactly which tasks or clients are generating unbilled overages.

When you have the data, conversations with clients change. Instead of a vague feeling that a retainer is "a lot of work," you can say, "Our tracking shows we're spending an average of 10 extra hours per month on content revisions beyond our agreed scope. Here's the data. Let's discuss how to adjust our agreement to cover this valuable work."

This moves the discussion from confrontation to collaboration. You're not complaining; you're providing information to ensure the partnership remains sustainable and high-quality. It allows you to re-scope the work formally before resentment builds on either side.

Internally, this data helps you write better scopes of work in the first place. You learn which activities are prone to creep and can build contingencies or clearer boundaries into future contracts. You stop the problem before it starts.