The hours you never invoiced
In most Nigerian professional firms the largest single leak is not unpaid bills. It is work that was done, was billable, and was never put on an invoice — because nobody wrote it down the day it happened.
Every figure below is hypothetical. The pattern is not.
A partner takes a forty-minute call on a Tuesday. Real advice, on a live matter, for a client who pays by the hour. He does not write it down, because he is going straight into a meeting and he will remember.
He will not remember. By Friday that forty minutes has gone, and it has gone in the specific way that leaves no trace: no invoice, no complaint, no visible gap. It simply never existed.
Do that a few times a week, across a few fee earners, and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable.
The size of it
Say a firm of six fee earners, each losing an average of forty-five minutes of genuinely billable time a day to unrecorded work, at a blended rate of ₦25,000 an hour.
| Lost per person per day | 0.75 hours |
| Fee earners | 6 |
| Working days a year | 240 |
| Blended hourly rate | ₦25,000 |
| Annual leakage | ₦27,000,000 |
That is not a collections problem, a pricing problem or a marketing problem. It is work already performed, already delivered, already costing the firm salaries — and never converted into a receivable.
Most firms would fight hard for a new client worth ₦27 million a year. Very few will spend two weeks fixing the timesheet habit that is worth the same amount.
Why it leaks
Same-day recording is the whole game. Time written down within the day is broadly accurate. Time reconstructed on Friday is a guess, and human guesses about our own effort are consistently low — people under-claim when reconstructing, because they only remember the substantial blocks and forget the fifteen-minute interruptions that make up a third of professional work.
Small units disappear. A firm that bills in 6-minute units captures the four-minute call. A firm that mentally rounds to the half hour discards it, because nobody writes down "0.5" for four minutes and nobody writes down "0.07" either. So it goes unrecorded entirely.
Non-obvious work is not recognised as billable. Reading the file before a meeting. Drafting the email that took three attempts. A call with the other side's counsel. All chargeable under most engagement letters, all routinely uncaptured because they do not feel like doing the work.
Nobody sees the gap. This is the structural reason. A missing invoice is visible. A missing time entry is visible to nobody, ever, unless somebody deliberately measures recorded hours against available hours.
Work in progress is an asset — treat it like one
Recorded-but-unbilled time is work in progress, and in most Nigerian firms it is invisible between the timesheet and the invoice.
It should sit on a report, per matter, showing:
- Hours recorded and not yet billed, valued at the matter's rate
- The age of the oldest unbilled entry on that matter
- Anything written off, and who authorised it
Ageing WIP is the number that matters. Time billed within the month is nearly always collected. Time billed four months late gets queried, discounted, or quietly abandoned — because the client no longer remembers the work and reasonably asks why, if it mattered, it took four months to mention. That is the same decay described in receivables aging, done properly, one stage earlier in the pipeline and far less visible.
The two numbers to run the firm on
Recording rate. Hours recorded divided by hours available. If a fee earner is present for 8 hours and records 4.5, that is 56% — and the question is not whether they were working, but where the other 3.5 hours went. Most firms have never calculated this and are startled by it.
Realisation rate. Value billed divided by value recorded. This catches the second leak — time that was recorded properly and then written down at billing, usually by a partner smoothing an invoice to avoid an awkward conversation. Those write-offs are decisions worth thousands, made privately, and almost never reviewed.
A firm that measures both can tell the difference between "we are not busy enough" and "we are busy and not capturing it" — which look identical from the bank balance and require opposite responses.
What to actually change
- Record same-day. Non-negotiable, including for partners — especially for partners, who are usually the worst offenders and the highest rate.
- Bill in 6-minute units so short work has somewhere to go.
- Put unbilled WIP by matter in front of whoever runs billing, weekly. Not monthly. Weekly.
- Bill on a cycle and hold it. Every matter, same date each month. Ad hoc billing is how four-month-old WIP happens.
- Make every write-off explicit, with a reason. Not to police anybody — so the firm can see the total. A partner who writes off ₦200,000 a month to keep clients comfortable is making a real commercial decision, and it should be a visible one.
None of this is software. All of it is habit, and the habit is worth more than any new client the firm will win this year.