Labour variance: billed vs actual hours
Use the Labour Variance dashboard card to compare billed hours against logged timesheet hours and spot leakage.
The Labour Variance card on the Dashboard shows you whether the labour you're charging for lines up with the hours your crew actually worked. It's a quick way to see if time is slipping through unbilled and costing you money.
What it compares
The card compares two figures over a period you select:
- Billed hours — calculated from hourly job material lines multiplied by the crew FTE on those lines.
- Logged hours — the actual hours recorded on timesheets.
For the billed side, "billed" counts jobs that are in Completed, Invoiced or Paid status.
What the card shows
At a glance you'll see:
- The variance between billed and logged hours
- A "$ worked but not billed" leakage figure, showing the dollar value of unbilled labour
- Weekly recovery-rate bars tracking how well you're recovering hours over time
- The largest-variance jobs, so you know where to look first
- Data-quality flags, such as "billed with no timesheets"
Start with the largest-variance jobs. Fixing the handful of jobs with the biggest gaps usually recovers the most labour for the least effort.
Requirement for FTE on materials
To calculate billed labour, the card needs crew and FTE values on your time-based materials. Without them, there's nothing to multiply the hourly lines by, so the billed figure can't be worked out.
If jobs appear under a data-quality flag like "billed with no timesheets", it usually means hours weren't logged for that job. Chase up the missing timesheets so your variance figures stay accurate.