I think some individuals go on here to fulfill their basic human need to troll people. We do know that is a basic human need right? 
. And by some people, I mostly mean the second individual of the above 2
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You’re clearly new here! I have one motto. I don’t troll.
Fee schedule.
$X for this service
$Y for that service
$Z for that other thing
And to figure out realization?
What’s realization?
Time spent in relation to fees. How do you calculate if you made money on a project if you’re not tracking hours spent on it?
can’t you just look at the income statement
I assume the income statement will tell you if the company made money overall but how do you do it by project if you’re not tracking time?
Maybe we should ask whether that metric is worth trying to approximate. How much money does my company make off me? Nobody knows. That goes into ULAE.
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And no one should know!
That’s my boss’s job.
My current position is the first where I ever had to track my time.
Every place else, I had, say, 80 clients to work on, and got all their shit done by the IRS deadlines. Plus some ad hoc work.
If the fees we collected exceeded my total compensation and overhead, the company made money.
it’s management’s job to set those fees so the account mangers exceed that threshold more often than not.
My industry doesn’t change much in what work has to be done annually, so management has a pretty good idea the time it takes to do many of the tasks needed, on average.
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It is worth tracking for setting fees. How else do you set fees in the future? Shot in the dark?
tracking hours is so passe, don’t let anyone disrespect you like that!
The time taken on average cant be known unless you track it and it varies widely by client
you’re in reserving?
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Its a bit ridiculous when people who flat out never worked in pension consulting think they know best how to run that business
I don’t think any of us is talking about pension consulting specifically.
In your company is there a floating fee schedule? Each client gets a different one?
For the most part, we charge a flat fee per year, with some ancillary costs for standard stuff. And a catch-all ad hoc rate for stuff that goes above and beyond the normal servicing of the accounts.
If management sees a narrowing gap between the fees they collect and the comp/overhead they are experiencing, there are a few solutions:
raise fees
bring in more business
keep costs stable or reduce costs (no raises? cut staff?)
cajole staff to start adding to the ad hoc portion of their bills
Two firms I worked with tackled the first one quite deftly I believe. In the service agreement it states that base fees (and maybe per life fees) will increase 3-5% annually. (We almost always did 3%)
This way, the clients aren’t hit with big fee increases every several years.
Okay well you can’t just take a shot in the dark for setting fees in pension consulting. You need a way to measure if the fees are profitable and that’s through tracking time
I think pensions were kind of a scam to begin with and we should all just move on to relying on saving our own money.