On 4th June, we brought together more than 60 meetings and events professionals from across Europe and beyond for a conversation we had been building towards for months. The topic: why so many event agencies are losing margin every month, and what integrated time tracking inside Qondor does to change that.

The session covered three things. Sandra Jademyr, our Customer Success Manager, made the commercial case for time tracking, drawing on both her own experience as a former event agency professional and a year of discovery conversations with Qondor customers across Europe. Marius Nagel-Petersen, our Product Lead, then walked through the time tracking module live inside Qondor, from logging a first entry to reading the cross-project time report. And we finished with a Q&A that surfaced some genuinely useful questions about how the feature works in practice.

If you were there, this article captures the highlights. If you missed it, the recording is below.

Where does event agency margin actually go?

Event agency margin disappears in the gap between hours worked and hours billed. The work happens; supplier calls, revision rounds, budget reconciliations, financial admin, but it never gets logged because each task feels too small to record. Over a month, the total is significant. Over a year, it's structural.

Sandra opened with a question that reframes the whole conversation:

"when a project closes, the client is happy and the team delivered, why does the margin so often come in lower than expected? Or worse, why is it sometimes impossible to tell, because the data simply isnt there?"

She walked through a pattern that most people in the room recognised immediately. In her previous role at an event agency, her team had agreed hourly rates with certain clients and had settled on billing four hours per project as a standard. Not because that was accurate. Because it felt safe, and there was no system pushing back on it with real data.

Behind those four hours was the actual work: venue sourcing, supplier coordination, the budget built and then revised, the client coming back with changes, the name corrections and allergy lists, the transfer manifest, the supplier invoices, the chased payments, the reconciliation. Sometimes a colleague had to step in for ticketing. Then finance got involved. None of that appeared on the invoice.

The team eventually tried a separate time tracking tool. It did't stick. Every project, customer and task had to be duplicated in a second system. Updating budgets and invoicing logged hours meant jumping between two platforms. As Sandra put it, she wasn't sure how many people actually bothered to do it.

What her team wanted was to log time directly inside the project in Qondor, where everything else already lived. At the time, that wasn't possible. Now it is.

What does the research say about unbilled time in events?

Research consistently shows that event professionals underestimate their own hours by 30 to 50 percent, and that more than half of agencies have significant unbilled labour, with 5 to 15 percent of work never reaching an invoice. The cause is structural: project-based roles generate hundreds of small tasks across multiple stakeholders, and most organisations lack the infrastructure to capture them.

Sandra then put the problem in quantitative terms, drawing on research findings from Qondor's customer discovery and adjacent industry data.

Professionals in project-based roles typically report only around 60% of their actual time worked. Adjacent industries tell a similar story: creative agencies and consulting firms report losing up to £50,000 per employee per year in unbilled time, with 68% attributing this directly to a lack of structure for capturing hours.

The three commercial consequences Sandra highlighted were clear. Inaccurate billing means missed revenue directly, with discovery suggesting a 25% improvement in billing accuracy when time is tracked inside the same system as the project. Weak visibility creates pricing drift, with teams quoting the next job from intuition rather than data; aligned budgets and actuals correspond to roughly a 20% improvement in estimate accuracy. And without real-time workload visibility, teams either over-resource or bring in external help at poor rates, with around 15% fewer urgent hires needed when planning data is available.

What is the "could you just" problem and why does it matter?

The "could you just" problem refers to the pattern of small client requests that event agencies absorb without billing, logging, or flagging as scope changes. Each request seems too minor to charge for. Collectively, they represent a meaningful and recurring margin loss across every project.

The small client requests that feel too minor to charge for, too minor to log, too minor to push back on. A quick change. A minor favour. A short call.

"You absorb the small tasks and they add up.
They quietly squeeze your margins."

Each task individually feels inconsequential. The problem is systemic. When those tasks are never logged, you have no aggregate view of what they cost. You can't use them to price more accurately next time. You can't show a client what is happening behind the scenes when they question an invoice. The work happened. It just has no record.

What questions did attendees ask?

The Q&A generated a number of practical questions. Here are the key ones:

Is it possible to track multiple projects at the same time?

The timer supports one active project at a time. For teams juggling several projects simultaneously, the recommended approach is to log time manually against each project rather than using the timer. Manual logging is available for any project at any time.

Is there a workflow approval process for logged time?

Not yet, but it is on the roadmap. Currently, all users can log time on any project they have access to. Approval workflows are being considered for a future release.

Is there a mobile option for logging time on the go or on site?

Not in the current release, but it is one of the most requested items. The team is actively working on how to support quick mobile logging for people who are travelling or on site. 

Can you log time against things that are not projects?

Currently, time logging is tied to projects. One workaround shared in the chat by an attendee is to create a project in Qondor for internal or non-client work. The team is also exploring how to support non-project time tracking natively in a future update.

How do I get access to time tracking in Qondor?

Time tracking is live in Qondor and available to all customers, but it isn't switched on automatically. If you are an existing Qondor customer, get in touch with your Customer Success Manager and they can shpw ypu the price plan and get you set up straight away. If you are not yet on Qondor, this is a good moment to see the full platform in action.