Writing WIP up, down or off with approval
How a firm writes unbilled time up, down or off in Achekam's WIP Register, when a second partner must approve, and where to see the effect on realisation.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Unbilled time is a promise, not revenue. Somewhere between the timesheet and the invoice, a partner decides how much of it the client will actually be asked to pay. That decision is where fee disputes start, where margin quietly leaks away, and where a firm's pricing problems either get noticed or get buried.
A firm that adjusts WIP without reasons and without a second pair of eyes ends up with realisation figures nobody trusts. A firm that records every adjustment, and has the large ones approved, can see which clients and which kinds of work are consistently under-priced.
Achekam's WIP Register is built around that second approach.
Three adjustments, three different meanings
In the WIP Register a partner, manager or administrator can change the value of unbilled time in three ways, each with a reason:
- Write-up: billing more than the time's value at standard rates, for example where the firm agreed a fixed fee that exceeds the time spent, or where specialist input justifies a premium.
- Write-down: billing less than the value, for example because the work overran what the engagement letter contemplated and the partner decides the client should not carry all of it.
- Write-off: removing the value entirely, for time that will never be billed.
The reason is the useful part. "Client relationship" tells a reviewer nothing next year. "Records arrived incomplete; clean-up beyond the agreed scope; fee to be revised in next year's letter" tells the firm what went wrong and what it intends to do about it.
The threshold and the second partner
Not every adjustment needs a committee. Achekam applies a threshold: write-downs above it, and every write-off, wait for approval by another partner. The threshold is the firm's own setting and is 10% by default.
So a small write-down to tidy an invoice goes through on the authority of the person making it. A larger write-down, or any write-off, sits until a second partner has looked at it. That partner is not re-doing the work; they are asking whether the reason holds up and whether the client relationship partner is being too generous, or too harsh, with the firm's money. Splitting the adjustment from its approval applies segregation of duties, which AccountingTools explains as assigning the steps in a process to different people so that no one can both commit and conceal an error.
A worked example in words
A manager on a year-end compilation finds that the bookkeeping clean-up took far longer than the fee in the engagement letter allowed for. The partner agrees the client should bear part of the overrun, but not all of it.
In the WIP Register, the partner writes the engagement's unbilled time down and records the reason: the clean-up went beyond the scope agreed, and next year's letter will price it separately. Because the write-down is above the firm's threshold, it waits for another partner. Once approved, the partner bills the remaining value into the client's invoice. Those hours are now billed, and they cannot be billed again from another invoice.
Billing WIP into an invoice once
That last point is the second control in the register. When unbilled time is billed into a client invoice, it is consumed. The same hours cannot appear on a second invoice, whether by accident on a busy billing day or because two people prepared invoices for the same client.
The invoices themselves, with receipts, credit notes and statements of account, sit in a receivables ledger on the server under BILLING & FINANCE.
Realisation and recovery afterwards
Adjustments only teach the firm something if it looks at them afterwards.
BILLING & FINANCE > Rate Cards & Realisation shows the age of unbilled work, realisation and recovery, built from the firm's rate cards. Time recorded by someone with no rate is counted as unvalued rather than estimated, so a missing rate shows up as a gap rather than as an invented value.
Two limits are worth knowing. The separate Recovery & Profitability screen shows "Not measured" for realisation and margin; the measured figures are on Rate Cards & Realisation, and the write-offs themselves are in the WIP Register. And scope variations logged under Billing & Finance are kept only in the browser in which they were entered. Do not rely on that log as the firm's record of an agreed change in scope. Put the change in the adjustment reason and in the engagement letter.
Billing controls in settings
The write-down threshold is one of several client billing controls a firm can set. Others can:
- require a second issuer for invoices above an amount the firm chooses;
- require approval of time before it can be billed.
The second of these connects to the timesheet stage. By default, time becomes billable only after someone other than the person who recorded it approves it, so WIP in the register has already been looked at once. How that works is covered in approving timesheets before billing.
A quarterly review of adjustments
Once a quarter, a partner who did not make the adjustments can work through them:
- List write-offs and large write-downs by client and by type of work.
- Read the reasons. Look for the same reason appearing again and again.
- Compare with realisation on Rate Cards & Realisation for the same clients.
- Identify engagements where the fee in the letter needs to change before the next year.
- Check that agreed scope changes made it into the letter, not only into an adjustment reason.
Repeated write-downs on the same client usually point to a pricing or scoping problem, not a billing one. Recurring fees are a common culprit; see retainers and the billing run for how those are raised.
Before your next billing run, check the threshold your firm has set, decide which partner will review adjustments for each team, and agree what a good reason looks like.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
