Fixed fee. Hours by grade.
The client sees $96,000. You see 400 hours by grade, partner to analyst, and which grade is running hot, this morning.
Industries · Global consulting firms
The hour past the budget. Held. Not eaten.
A $96,000 fixed fee sized at 400 hours is a number only the engagement team knows. Ceed counts every hour against it as it is logged, by grade, and holds the one that would cross it.
For the practice inside a large firm. The firm’s ledger, timesheet and billing stay where they are.
Ashgrove Utilities · September · phase one, 400 hHeld
406.0 of 400 h
Thu 3 Sep · 6.0 h · Operating model deck, third read by the steering committee · Ines M.
Held for approval. 6.0 h over the engagement budget.
ApproveDecline
$96,000
the fixed fee for phase one
400 h
the hours behind it, by grade
$240
the hour past it, on a signed change request
$96
Ceed, this month
The month-end review tells you last. The hour tells you first.
The engagement review lands in the fourth week. By then the team has booked forty and worked fifty, because nobody wanted to be the one who blew the budget. The partner reads a healthy margin. The hours were real. They went missing between the timesheet and the review.
“Then I’m getting hounded on utilization so if I eat hours my realization is better but then it looks like I’m not doing the work. I’m only a senior and don’t understand why this is my problem.”
An audit senior, on Fishbowl, about 2022.
Ceed counts every hour against the budget you sized the fee with, by person and by grade, as it is logged. The hour that would cross it waits for the engagement partner that day, with its reason attached. Nothing is eaten. The next fee is priced on the hours this one took.
This morning · Fri 4 Sep5 engagements
Ashgrove Utilities · phase one, 400 h6.0 h held
Corbett Rail · diagnostic, 480 h61.0 h left
Silverline Pharma · programme office, 160 h a month12.0 h left
Duneport Logistics · fixed fee, 800 h0 h left
Winterfold Bank · change request 2, 120 h8.0 h approved
Every engagement’s budget, every morning. Visible to the partners and whoever they name.
Held. Not hidden.
The hour that would push a client over budget is saved, marked, and waits for a yes or no. Nothing is billed quietly. Nothing disappears.
- Logged
6.0 h · Ashgrove Utilities · Operating model deck, third read
- Held
Over the 400-hour budget. Waiting for the engagement partner.
- Approved
On change request 1 at $240. The client signed on Friday, before the steering committee.
One set of hours. Everything follows.
Contractors on the team. Same record.
An independent consultant on a day rate logs to the same budget. Her statement is computed from the entries your invoice used, at her rate, never at the client’s.
Change request. Before the work.
Hours past the budget bill only on a signed change request. The hour waits while you ask. If the answer is no, it stays on the record as the hour the firm gave away, in the open.
Invoice · Ashgrove Utilities · September 2026Computed
Phase one, operating model design · fixed fee, 400 h$96,000.00
Change request 1 · 6.0 h at $240.00$1,440.00
Total$97,440.00
Computed from the statement of work dated 8 Jun 2026. Handed to your billing team as a document. The firm’s system sends it.
From the field. In their words.
What people at the largest firms say in public about eating hours, budgets that blow, and the billable hour after AI. Linked and dated. Not our words.
Said on X.
I have never seen an administrative process managed so effectively (and aggressively) as time sheets with Big 4
… If you unpack it, it makes sense why they are that way. Probably years of delinquencies with same people
Their bonuses got dinked apparently
McKinsey already generates 25% of its fees from outcomes-based pricing. Strategy advice accounts for less than 20% of the firm’s work. …
The pricing math is structural. In billable hours, AI productivity means more output per hour, more revenue per consultant. In outcomes-based pricing, AI productivity means same outcome delivered faster, less revenue per project. …
Accenture $ACN is down 58% in a year. One of the great compounders of the last decade, wiped out.
… Now the tool may not need a teacher. The work that fills billable hours, the coding, the testing, the documentation, is exactly what agentic AI does first and cheapest.
You can’t partner with clients while you bill them hourly.
Hourly billing is an adversarial structure. You profit when things take longer. They profit when things go faster.
That’s not a partnership. That’s a conflict of interest.
Said on YouTube.
Said elsewhere.
- FishbowlI’m a lateral partner, from MBB to Big 4. Help me understand “eating hours”.Consulting bowl · about 2019 · 28 comments · “your team all bill a flat 40 while working more, maybe even much much more”
- FishbowlHave you ever ate hours because of the budget?Accounting bowl · about 2021 · 71 comments · “I don’t know anyone who’s time sheet is an accurate reflection of what they’ve worked”
- FishbowlPartners, if the project goes over budget every year, why would you assume the issue is staff being inefficient?Audit · about 2020 · “people eat time and don’t let it fully blow up that the partner underbid”
- FishbowlCan anyone explain how to calculate margin on a fixed fee engagement?about 2018 · 27 comments · a $100k fee, $120k of hours in the system, and a $20k performance loss found at the end of the project
- ArticleDon’t Eat Hours, You IdiotsAdrienne Gonzalez, Going Concern · November 2014 · a firm’s memo to staff: unrecorded hours “create the appearance that we have adequate capacity to grow with the current resources that we have”
- Hacker NewsOptimistic invoicing, and eating billable weeksThomas Ptacek · August 2024 · “Serious consultancies routinely eat billable weeks of time in order to meet client success criteria and retain relationships”
- Hacker NewsHave McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?October 2024 · 168 points · “They pay you X and then bill you for X*1.3 (minimum)”, “More likely … 3X”, “my average multiple is 6x”
- ReviewIndependent Review into Workplace Culture at EY OceaniaElizabeth Broderick & Co., commissioned by EY · July 2023 · a section headed “Inaccurate recording of hours”, and 31% working 51 hours or more at least one week in four
- ArticleSpain fines “Big Four” consulting firms for “marathon” working daysLaura Llach, Euronews · September 2023 · at least €1.4 million, for firms that “lacked an hourly register”
- ArticleAI Efficiency Gains Push Accounting Firms to Reimagine PricingJorja Siemons, Bloomberg Tax · March 2026 · PwC’s US tax leader: “Time’s becoming less and less of relevance”
- Interview“We Want to Make Ourselves Better”Bob Sternfels with Adi Ignatius, Harvard Business Review · January 2026 · “Today about a third of our revenue comes from underwriting outcomes”
- ArticleKPMG pressed its auditor to pass on AI cost savingsStephen Foley, Irish Times · February 2026 · a 14% fee cut, from $416,000 to $357,000, and both firms’ statements
- YouTubeMcKinsey Plans to Cut Thousands of JobsBloomberg Television · December 2025 · 5 min · the centennial, then “time to get leaner”
- YouTubeA Conversation with Deloitte Global CEO Joe UcuzogluColumbia Business School · August 2026 · 47 min · the newest long recording of a Big Four chief executive on AI and the firm
- TalkThe Billable Hour is Dead; Long Live the Billable HourKevin Madura and Mo Bhasin, AlixPartners, at AI Engineer · July 2025 · 17 min · how AI reprices the hour inside a strategy house
- LinkedInThe Last Billable HourMathilde Henry, professional services and P&L leader · August 2026 · “We built a model where getting faster makes you poorer.”
- LinkedInThe better the technology gets, the fewer hours they have to sellJames O’Dowd, Patrick Morgan · August 2026 · “every productivity gain risks becoming a gift to the client”
- LinkedInWhy selling consulting hours is a race to the bottomCharley Grant, Head of Consulting, Andersen · September 2026 · “Enterprise clients do not care about timesheets or billable increments”
- PodcastTimesheets Cause Accountants To Flee ProfessionThe Accounting Podcast, Blake Oliver and David Leary · February 2022 · a Big Four listener on “track what you work, work what you track”
- PodcastWhat Academic Research Says About Hours, Pay and SatisfactionBig 4 Transparency, Dominic Piscopo with Dr. Ryan Dunn · August 2026 · the first peer-reviewed study of the community’s hours and pay data
- TalkClay Christensen and Dominic Barton on Consulting’s DisruptionHBR IdeaCast · September 2013 · the classic, with McKinsey’s then managing partner in the room
Of what you invoice. That is the pricing page.
Invoice $96,000 this month for Ashgrove Utilities and Ceed costs $96. A practice invoicing $4 million a month pays $4,000. Ceed charges 0.1% of the invoices it computes, so an engagement the firm bills without Ceed costs nothing. No seats, no tiers, no minimum.
Questions. Answers.
The firm runs its own timesheet and ledger. Does Ceed replace them?
No. The firm’s timesheet feeds the firm’s ledger at month end, and billing stays where it is. Ceed is the practice’s own record of hours against engagement budgets. It holds the hour the firm’s system reports three weeks later. Pulling time from the firm’s system is not built today. Write to hello@ceed.so and a person replies.
Our people already fill a timesheet on Friday. Is this a second one?
Yes, and it takes under a minute a day, from Slack. The Friday timesheet is for the ledger. Ceed’s entry counts against the engagement budget the moment it is logged. The partner sees the crossing on Thursday, not in the review three weeks later.
The budget is 400 hours across five people, one of them a contractor. Who is held first?
Whoever logs the hour that crosses it. The hold shows to that person and to the engagement partner, with the entry and its reason. The contractor’s statement waits with it. Nobody is asked to book forty and work fifty.
We sell fixed fees and outcomes, not hours. Why count hours at all?
Because the fee was sized in hours by grade, and the margin is still the fee less the cost of the hours. The client sees the fee. You see whether it still fits the work, and the next one is priced on what this one took.
Can the engagement budget stay private to the partners?
The hours left on the engagement are visible to the people who log them, so they can see the edge. Rates, cost and margin are visible only to the people you grant, and the server enforces it.
From the blog: Held. Not hidden. The agreement said 40 hours. The month said 47. Other firms Ceed is for: Management consulting · IT consulting · Accounting and fractional CFOs · all nineteen.