How Bright Canvas Creative Recovered $142K in Unbilled Hours
A 22-person creative agency in Austin was losing revenue to untracked hours. Here's how they went from 54% to 78% billable utilization in six months.
The Company
Bright Canvas Creative is a full-service branding and digital agency based in Austin, Texas. Founded in 2018 by Sarah Mitchell, the agency has grown to 22 people across design, development, strategy, and account management.
They work with mid-market clients on retainer-based engagements: brand identity systems, website builds, social campaigns, and content strategy. Most projects run 2-6 months with teams of 3-5 people working across multiple clients simultaneously.
"We knew we were leaving money on the table. We just didn't know how much."
Like most agencies, Bright Canvas relied on their team to manually log hours at the end of each day. In practice, most people batch-entered time on Friday afternoons, estimating what they'd worked on throughout the week.
The result: inaccurate timesheets, unbilled hours that slipped through the cracks, and zero visibility into whether the team was over- or under-utilized.
"Our designers would spend two hours in a brainstorm, then forget to log it. Our developers would context-switch between three clients in a day and just round to the nearest hour. We were billing 54% of our capacity and wondering why margins were tight."
54%
Billable utilization before Timedox
~$12K
Unbilled hours lost per person, per year
8+ hrs
Spent monthly reconciling timesheets
Why they chose Timedox
Sarah evaluated four time tracking tools. Two were too complex. One required too much manual input. Timedox stood out for one reason: the Desktop App's Automatic In-Out feature.
"I didn't want another tool my team would resent. The fact that Timedox could detect when someone sits down at their computer and clock them in automatically was the deciding factor. My team doesn't even think about it."
The project-based tracking and billable tagging sealed the deal. Every hour could be mapped to a client and tagged as billable or internal, with one tap if the team wanted to add detail, or fully automatic if they didn't.
Automatic In-Out
Desktop app clocks team in/out based on presence. No buttons, no reminders.
Billable Tagging
Every hour tagged as billable or internal. Default billable per project.
Utilization Reports
Real-time billable ratios per person, team, and client engagement.
What Bright Canvas Creative sees every day
The same Timedox dashboard every customer uses. No custom build, just clear data.
Dashboard
Team Overview
Active now
18
+3 from yesterday
Total hours
142h
On break
2
Sites
4
Sarah Miller
Headquarters
James Chen
Downtown Office
Maria Lopez
Remote
David Kim
Field Site A
From signup to full adoption
Setup and onboarding
Sarah set up the Timedox account, created projects for each active client, and invited all 22 team members. The Desktop App was installed on every machine. Total setup time: 45 minutes.
Automatic In-Out goes live
Designers, developers, and strategists stopped manually clocking in. The Desktop App's presence detection handled it silently. The team barely noticed the switch.
First billable report pulled
Sarah exported the first month's data. The numbers were eye-opening: the team had been working 22% more billable hours than they were logging. That was $11,800 in unbilled time in a single month.
Utilization targets established
With three months of accurate data, Bright Canvas set team-level utilization targets for the first time. They restructured two unprofitable client engagements and shifted resources to higher-margin projects.
Client billing transformed
Client invoices now included detailed Timedox time reports. Two clients who had previously disputed hours actually increased their retainers after seeing the transparency. Zero billing disputes since launch.
Inside Bright Canvas Creative
The numbers after one year
$142K
in recovered billable hours (first year)
78%
billable utilization rate (up from 54%)
12 hrs
saved per month on timesheet reconciliation
100%
team adoption within 2 weeks
"Timedox didn't just help us track time. It changed how we understand our business. We can see which clients are profitable, which teams are overloaded, and where every hour goes. We made more money without doing more work."
Sarah Mitchell
Founder & Agency Director, Bright Canvas Creative
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