Work Distribution

Five views of where the agency's committed hours actually sit: by department, service line, team member, Account Executive, and month. Built to expose bottlenecks, spare capacity, and unhealthy billab

The Work Distribution report answers a question most agencies can only guess at: where is all the work, and who is carrying it?

Every hour costed on an active Job is plotted five different ways, so the same body of work can be read by department, by service line, by person, by Account Executive, and across the calendar. Because Agencydesk was built exclusively for agencies, the hours come from the same Job Costing your team delivers against, so nothing has to be assembled or estimated to produce it.

Open it from Reports in the left-hand navigation, then the Work Distribution tab.

The four measures

Every chart uses the same four-part stacked bar, so once you can read one you can read all of them:

Segment	Colour	What it means
Billable Tracked	Dark blue	Billable hours already logged
Billable Remaining	Blue	Billable hours costed but not yet tracked. The workload still to come, and the earnings still to convert
Non-Billable Tracked	Dark grey	Hours logged on internal, admin, or non-revenue work
Non-Billable Remaining	Light grey	Non-billable hours costed but not yet tracked

Two readings come out of that:

• Total bar length is the total committed workload. How much work is on the books.

• Tracked against remaining is how much of that workload has already been consumed, and how much is still coming.

The grey segments deserve as much attention as the blue ones. Non-billable hours are real capacity being spent, they just are not being paid for. A department carrying a visibly grey bar is doing work the agency is absorbing, and that is worth understanding rather than discovering at Recon.

Reading the charts

Hover for exact values

Hover any segment to see the grouping name, the work type, and the exact number of hours, for example Design, Billable Tracked: 362. That gives you precise figures without exporting anything.

Click to drill down

Click a bar to open a detailed breakdown. A popup lists every Job contributing to that total, with Billable Tracked, Billable Remaining, Non-Billable Tracked, and Non-Billable Remaining hours per Job. The list is paginated with a page-size control, and Job names link through to the Job itself.

So a bar that looks wrong is never a dead end. Click it and you have the Jobs responsible, which is where you find out whether non-billable time is accumulating on one account or spread thinly across many.

Toggle segments with the legend

Click any item in the legend to show or hide that segment. Useful for isolating a single question:

• Hide everything but Billable Remaining to see revenue still to convert.

• Hide the billable segments to look only at non-billable load.

• Compare tracked against remaining without the other two in the way.

Active Work by Department

Hours grouped by the Department attached to each Task Type.

This is the clearest read on where the agency's pressure sits. Design, Development, Content, SEO, Strategy, PPC and the rest each show their committed load, and the length of the bars against each other tells you which parts of the studio are carrying the business.

Great for knowing when to hire. A department that consistently runs the longest bar month after month is not having a busy spell, it is the constraint on everything downstream. That is a signal to expand the department so work can flow again, and it is a far better basis for the decision than one overloaded person asking for help.

Active Work by Category

The same hours grouped by Job Category, so you see which service lines are actually driving volume: Websites, Monthly Digital Marketing Retainers, Corporate Identity, Email Campaigns, Digital Strategy, and so on.

Great for a sales and pricing conversation. When one category carries a third of the agency's committed hours, it deserves attention on rates, on templated delivery, and on whether it is being sold at the margin it should be. It also shows which categories absorb the most internal effort relative to what they earn.

Active Work by Team Member

Every user with committed hours, ranked by load.

This is where overload and spare capacity become obvious. A very long bar is someone at risk of becoming the bottleneck. A very short one is either someone underutilised or someone whose work is not being scheduled properly.

Great for checking the billable ratio person by person. Someone whose bar is largely grey is spending their week on work nobody is paying for. That may be entirely correct for an internal or support role, or it may mean they are under-allocated to revenue-generating work. Either way it is better seen than assumed.

Active Work by Account Executive

Hours grouped by the Account Executive responsible for the Job.

Where the Team Member view shows who is doing the work, this shows who is managing it. An AE with twelve hundred committed hours is carrying a materially different load to one with two hundred, regardless of how many Jobs each has open.

Great for balancing the book. Volume of Jobs is a poor measure of an Account Executive's load, since one retainer can outweigh six small campaigns. Hours under management is the honest number, and it is the one to use before handing out the next account. It also surfaces the portfolio carrying an unusual amount of non-billable work.

Active Work by Month

A month-by-month column chart of committed hours, based on Task due dates.

Because it reads from due dates rather than from when work was booked, it shows where the workload is genuinely landing. Peaks are months the agency has already committed to delivering. Troughs are months with room in them.

Great for seeing a crunch before it arrives. A month sitting at nine hundred hours against a studio that can deliver six hundred is a problem you can still solve in advance, by moving deadlines, bringing in freelance capacity, or staging the work differently. Found on the day, it is just a late Job.

The quiet months matter as much. A visible trough two months out is the window for new business to fill, or for the internal work that never gets scheduled.

What to look for

Across all five views, a handful of patterns are worth acting on:

• Bottlenecks. One row consistently longer than the rest is where everything else is queueing.

• Underutilisation. Short bars on people or departments who should be busy usually means work is not being scheduled to them rather than that there is nothing to do.

• An unhealthy billable ratio. Large grey segments mean capacity is going into work nobody is paying for.

• Consumption running ahead of the plan. Bars that are mostly dark blue with little bright blue left mean the committed work is nearly used up, and the pipeline behind it needs checking.

• A department that always carries the most. Sustained over months, that is the case for growing the team rather than pushing harder.

Billable utilisation benchmarks

The report is most useful when you are measuring against a target rather than looking at shapes. The ranges below are widely used across consulting, IT, marketing, and creative agencies as sustainable benchmarks.

Delivery and production roles

Target range: 70% to 85% billable

• 70% to 80% is generally considered optimal.

• Below 70% may point to underutilisation or too much internal work.

These roles are expected to focus primarily on client delivery, while still leaving room for training, collaboration, and internal tasks.

Account Executives and senior roles

Target range: 60% to 75% billable

Lower utilisation is expected here, because the role carries:

• Coordination and communication

• Client relationship management

• Oversight and quality control

• Business development

Senior leadership and partners commonly sit between 30% and 60%, depending on how much of the role is strategic.

Agency average

Target range: 70% to 80% billable

• 75% to 80% supports strong profitability.

• Recent industry data puts actual averages nearer 69%, under economic pressure.

• IT and consulting agencies often push toward 85%, while creative and marketing agencies typically operate between 60% and 80%.

Utilisation is a capacity measure, not a profitability measure. A team running at 85% billable on underpriced work is busier and no better off. Read this report alongside Recon, which prices the hours at what they actually cost you.