Non-billable hours
Non-billable hours are hours of real work that no client engagement carries: internal projects, recruitment, tooling, training, admin and sales. The work is genuine. It simply belongs to the firm rather than to a client, and that distinction is the whole of the category.
The name does the category a disservice. It defines useful work by what it is not, and invites a reader to treat it as leakage.
Much of it is the opposite. Improving a deployment pipeline, mentoring a junior, writing the proposal that wins next quarter's work: all non-billable, all things a firm stops functioning without.
A team driven to near-zero non-billable time is not efficient. It has stopped investing in itself, and the effect shows up later as slower delivery and people leaving.
What the category does need is structure. Lumped into one bucket labelled internal, it cannot be reasoned about. Split into a handful of named internal projects, it becomes readable: this much went to hiring, this much to tooling, this much to work that had to be redone.
That last one deserves its own project. Rework nobody charges for looks like generic internal time, so it disappears into the bucket. Given a name, it turns into a number somebody can act on, and it is usually a bigger number than anyone expected.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster marks a project Non-Billable at the project level, so internal work is logged as its own project and appears in the hours breakdown rather than disappearing.
Questions people ask
Is non-billable time wasted time?
No. Recruitment, training, tooling and proposal work are all non-billable and all necessary. The label describes who carries the cost, not whether the work was worth doing.
How much non-billable time is normal?
It varies so widely by firm and role that a benchmark would mislead. Your own trend is the useful comparison, especially around the months you were hiring.
Should internal projects be set up properly?
Yes, and named specifically. One general internal project tells you a number. Several named ones tell you where the year actually went.