At a glance

  • Professional services attrition held near 11% in 2025, and A&E firms reported 13.8% turnover.
  • The weekly timesheet is the process every billable person touches, so it shapes how they judge the firm.
  • Late, rebuilt-from-memory time also costs the CFO: slower invoices, write-downs, and forecasts that arrive too late.
  • Firms that fix it draft time from bookings, catch errors at entry, and leave the final word with the consultant.

Keeping good people is the constraint in a firm that sells expertise. SPI Research put professional services attrition at 11.3% in 2025.

Deltek’s 2026 Clarity study of nearly 900 architecture and engineering firms found 13.8% turnover. In the same study, 80% of those firms named the availability of good candidates as a top challenge.

Most of what keeps people sits outside any system. But one process reaches every billable person every week, and it is usually treated as admin.

The Friday timesheet tells people how the firm runs

We call it the Friday timesheet: the hour a consultant spends rebuilding the week from memory, email, and calendar. It is the firm’s most regular contact with its people, and it is often the worst-designed.

Consultants notice. A timesheet that asks for what the firm should already know says the firm doesn’t know where its people are. An approval rejected for a wrong task code, three days later, says the same thing again.

This is our judgment, from running a firm whose consultants bill their own time. We know of no study that isolates timesheets as a cause of attrition. But the people you most want to keep are the ones with the least patience for work that serves no one.

Late time costs the CFO as much as the consultant

The same Friday habit shows up in the numbers. Time entered late means invoices go out late, and work in progress sits unbilled.

Time rebuilt from memory gets rounded, misallocated, or written down. And a project manager can’t forecast a fixed-fee job from last week’s hours if they arrive next Wednesday.

So better time capture is one of the rare changes that the CFO and the consultants want for the same reason. Nobody wants the week reconstructed after the fact.

Draft the week from the work, then let people confirm it

The fix is to stop asking people to type what the firm already knows. Their assignments and bookings say which projects they planned to work on. Their calendar says which client meetings happened.

Agents at work: on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, the Time Entry Agent, in paid public preview, drafts each team member’s time every day from their assignments and bookings. It can write the entry’s description from relevant Outlook meeting titles, and people can turn that off. Each week it sends a Teams reminder about missing hours, with suggested entries to fill them.

The consultant stays in charge. They review the drafts, change what’s wrong, and submit. They can also tell the agent to stop creating entries for them at any time.

Catch mistakes when time is entered

Rejected timesheets are the second irritant, and most are preventable. Project Operations now lets administrators set a maximum daily duration for a time entry, generally available since July 24, 2026. A minimum time interval was scheduled for general availability in August 2026.

Microsoft has also added time entry straight from the assignment and booking views, in preview since June 2026 and planned for general availability in October 2026. For project managers, the Approvals Agent is in paid public preview. The manager still approves.

With the rules in the system, the manager’s approval becomes a check on the work itself.

Drafts are only as good as the staffing data

The agent drafts from assignments and bookings. Where a team doesn’t book people to projects, Microsoft’s documentation says it can only copy the previous week’s entries.

A copied week is still a guess. So a firm that wants drafted time has to keep bookings current first, which is also what fixes low utilization.

Some firms need a stricter timekeeping design

This approach has limits.

Firms with cost-type or time-and-materials federal contracts need daily timekeeping and an audit trail that satisfies DCAA. A draft from a booking must never replace a person’s own record of the hours they actually worked. Design the drafting around your timekeeping policy, with your compliance lead, before you switch it on.

Staff classified as non-exempt under the FLSA raise overtime questions. Their time capture policy should come from HR and counsel, and the system settings should follow it.

The agent has product limits too. Reminders run weekly, at the start of each person’s week, and users can’t change that.

The Teams cards don’t update in real time, and people can’t give the agent free-form instructions. It is a preview, so plan the rollout around what is generally available and add the agent when it’s ready for your firm.

What firm leaders should do next

Treat time entry as part of the employee experience, not as admin. Ask your consultants what Friday afternoon costs them, and measure it.

Draft time from bookings. People confirm and correct the draft.

Move the rules to the point of entry. Daily limits and minimum intervals catch errors before a manager has to reject anything.

Keep bookings current before you add drafting. A draft built on stale bookings wastes the time it was meant to save.

Write the timekeeping policy first where contracts demand it. Federal and non-exempt rules shape the design.

How we know this

This point of view comes from Ludia’s delivery on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations. It also comes from running a firm whose consultants bill their own time. The link between timesheets and retention is our judgment, not a measured result.

(1) SPI Research, 2026 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark (2025 data), as reported by Deltek, 2026 PSO Benchmarks: Insights from SPI Benchmark Maturity Report (July 30, 2026). Source of 11.3% attrition. Certinia’s summary of the same report gives 11.4%: Analyzing the 2026 SPI Research Professional Services Maturity Benchmark Report (2026).

(2) Deltek, 47th Annual Deltek Clarity Architecture & Engineering Industry Study (2026). Source of 13.8% turnover, the nearly 900 firms, and the 80% citing candidate availability.

(3) Microsoft Learn, Responsible AI FAQ for the Time Entry feature of the Time and Expense Agent (updated July 2026). Source of how the agent drafts, reminds, and can be switched off, and of its limits.

(4) Microsoft Learn, New and planned features for Dynamics 365 Project Operations, 2026 release wave 1 (updated Sept 3, 2026). Source of the time entry controls and their dates. Agent status as tracked by Ludia on Sept 29, 2026: Time Entry, Expense, and Approvals agents in paid public preview.