Is your billing model making your team miserable?
Value pricing is usually a revenue conversation, but it's also a talent strategy. And the connection to your team's well-being starts with how you bill.
Every few minutes, your team is being asked to justify their existence.
For some firms, it’s every five minutes. And for others, it’s every six (or one tenth of an hour).
These are the increments at the heart of traditional hourly billing. Every task, every call, every email has a timer attached to it. Do it fast and you've cost the firm money. Do it slowly and you've cost the client.
This is usually discussed as a revenue model decision. But it’s also a culture decision, one with direct consequences for how your people experience their work. And there's now data to prove it.
The staff satisfaction gap related to billing
The 2024 Tri-Merit CPA Career Satisfaction Survey surfaced an important finding: 60% of CPAs who were not required to track and report their time described themselves as highly satisfied in their careers. And among those who were required to track time, that figure dropped to 48%.
Could your billing model be shaping how your team feels about their work every single day?
The same research found that CPAs at firms with readily available mental health resources are more than twice as likely to be highly satisfied, suggesting firms aren't blind to well-being as a priority, but they just haven't connected it to the billing system.
How time tracking shapes culture
Time tracking does something specific to how people think about their work. It reframes effort as output. The measure of a good day is whether you hit your billable hours target, not necessarily the quality of the advice you gave a client.
This framing has a corrosive effect on someone’s professional identity.
It also creates a particular kind of stress. When every activity has to be accounted for and justified, the cognitive overhead of simply doing your job goes up. You're doing more than just solving the client's problem—you're narrating it, categorizing it, and worrying about whether six minutes was the right amount of time to spend on it.
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