Billable utilisation
Billable utilisation counts only client-attributable hours in its numerator, against the same baseline a total utilisation figure uses. Somebody logging forty hours of which twenty-four are client work shows 100% total utilisation and 60% billable utilisation on a forty hour baseline.
The pair is worth more than either half. The total says whether a week was full. The billable share says how much of that full week went to clients.
A wide gap is the signal. It can mean healthy internal work. It can also mean a team soaking up rework, or somebody with no client job who is keeping busy on tasks nobody asked for.
The figure is easy to move and easy to misread. A lead who reclassifies borderline work as client work lifts it, and nothing real has changed.
Its ceiling is worth saying out loud. Nobody can be near fully billable and still do the internal work a firm runs on. Push the figure up and one of two things happens. The internal work stops, or it gets logged as something else. The second is worse, because the number improves while the truth gets harder to find.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster derives this from the Billable flag on each project and the hours logged against it. The capacity plan filters on the same flag, so planned and logged billable time can be read side by side.
Questions people ask
How is billable utilisation different from utilisation?
The numerator. Utilisation counts all logged hours. Billable utilisation counts only the client-flagged ones. The denominator is the same, so the difference is the internal share.
Should billable utilisation be measured per person?
With care. A person with no client project assigned cannot influence their own figure, so a personal target punishes them for a staffing decision somebody else made.
Does a high billable share mean a profitable project?
Not on its own. Profitability needs rates, cost and a contract value. A high billable share says the hours were chargeable, not what they earned.