The Kindness That Costs: Reckoning With the Unbilled Half-Hour

There is a particular kind of call that arrives on a Tuesday afternoon. It begins with an apology and a promise that it will only take five minutes, and it concerns something that sits just outside the agreed scope. The answer, given generously and immediately, is usually correct. It is also, in the aggregate, one of the largest unbilled items in any professional services business.

What makes these calls difficult to discuss is that they are not a failure of discipline in any obvious sense. They are a symptom of a good instinct — responsiveness — operating without a structure to contain it. Nobody in the firm decides to give away a hundred hours a year. It happens in increments too small to challenge and too frequent to notice.

The arithmetic that never reaches the ledger

Consider a five-person team where each member takes three such calls a week, averaging twelve minutes including the follow-up note. That is three hours a week, or roughly a hundred and fifty hours a year, per team. Multiply by a charge-out rate and add the interruption cost — the twenty minutes of concentration lost on either side of the call — and the figure becomes uncomfortable. It will not appear anywhere in the management accounts, because unbilled time is invisible by definition. It shows up instead as a vague sense that utilisation is harder to hit than it used to be.

The second cost is less measurable and more serious. When advice is given free and informally, the boundary of the engagement quietly moves. Clients who receive a prompt, uncharged answer to a question outside scope are being taught, reasonably enough, that scope is negotiable. Six months later, a conversation about a fee increase is being met with genuine puzzlement.

Why we do not write it down

Few people avoid logging ad hoc advice out of laziness. The reasons are usually better than that. Recording a six-minute call feels bureaucratic. Time-recording systems are built for projects, not for interruptions, and forcing a five-minute item into a project code takes longer than the call itself. There is also a professional reluctance to seem transactional — to be the adviser who starts a timer when a long-standing client asks a straightforward question. That reluctance is worth respecting. It is not, however, a reason to remain ignorant of what the generosity costs.

Log, then decide — in that order

A workable approach separates measurement from policy. For one quarter, record every informal request with three data points: who asked, how long it took, and what it concerned. No charging, no visible change to the client relationship, no announcement. The purpose is simply to replace an impression with a number.

What usually emerges is a pattern rather than a uniform spread. A small number of clients and one or two recurring topics will account for the bulk of the time. That finding is far more useful than a blanket policy, because it points to a structural answer: a different retainer, an additional service line, a short set of written answers that removes the recurring question altogether. Some of the demand, meanwhile, turns out to be genuinely trivial and rightly absorbed. Knowing which is which is the whole point.

Boundaries that do not sound like a warning

Once the pattern is visible, the conversation with clients can be framed around access rather than restriction. A sentence such as 'we hold a short slot each week for questions of this kind, and anything larger we will scope properly' sets a limit without implying that goodwill has been withdrawn. The tone matters: the aim is to make the arrangement predictable, not to suggest that the client has been taking liberties.

Internally, the equivalent is a light-touch convention — a single line in the weekly update noting ad hoc advice given, and to whom. Firms that do this consistently find that the exercise becomes self-regulating after a quarter or two. Nobody wants to be the person whose row is conspicuously empty or conspicuously full.

Designing access people can actually use

Given the choice, most clients prefer a defined arrangement to an ambiguous favour, because a defined arrangement is something they can budget for and rely on. That may take the form of a modest monthly support allowance with an agreed response window; a block of pre-purchased hours drawn down against a simple log; or fixed weekly office hours, open to a named group of contacts, where short questions are welcome and longer ones are booked.

Each option converts an unpredictable cost into a stated one and, importantly, gives the client permission to ask. The informal call does not disappear under such arrangements. It simply stops being the only channel available, and stops being the one that quietly subsidises everything else.

The instinct to answer is a good one, and no firm should train it out of its people. But generosity that cannot be sustained eventually turns into resentment, and resentment is a poor foundation for advice. Counting the half-hour is not a retreat from service. It is the means by which the service remains worth giving.