Billable hours
Billable hours are the logged hours attributable to work done for a client, as distinct from time spent on a firm's own operation. A developer's eleven hours on a client build are billable. The same person's afternoon in an internal planning session is not.
The classification is a judgement made once per piece of work, and it decides how a whole delivery reads afterwards.
Boundary cases cause most of the arguments. A scoping call before a contract. Rework after a mistake. Travel. A long handover. Each is defensible either way, which is why the rule has to be written down rather than decided per entry by whoever is logging.
Consistency matters more than which way the rule falls. Two leads applying different boundaries make every cross-project comparison meaningless.
Worth saying plainly: billable is a classification, not an amount. It says the hour belongs to client work. Turning that into a figure needs a rate, a contract and a billing step, and those are a separate system from the one recording the hour.
Keeping the two apart is useful in itself. The question of where an hour went can be settled by the person who worked it. What that hour is worth is a commercial decision made elsewhere, by somebody with the contract in front of them.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster carries Billable as a flag on each project and filters hours and the capacity plan by it. Billable and non-billable time come from the same timesheets, so the split is never a separate spreadsheet.
Questions people ask
What makes an hour billable?
The engagement it belongs to, under a rule the firm has written down. It is not a property of the task. The same activity can be billable on one project and internal on another.
Should rework be billable?
That depends on the cause and on the contract, and firms genuinely differ. What matters is that the rule is decided ahead of time rather than argued about at month end.
Where does PeopleMuster show billable hours?
On the capacity plan, which filters to billable or non-billable work, and on the project list, where each project carries its flag. The hours logged against those projects feed the utilisation reports.