As the others have said- yes, all consulting firms have staff fill out timesheets.One interesting thing- many staff work more than 40 or 50 hours- and work more hours than the project budget allows for. So each firm must determine how it wants to track the u2018extrau2022 hours. The simplistic approach is to tell staff u2018just bill 44 {or whatever the weekly total is} hours to the projectu2019- as this simplifies accounting. The more accurate approach is harder: staff record every hour worked and code it to the relevant activity (internal / client). This requires some discipline about using u2018shadowu2022 client codes so that you bill them the time agreed in the contract {e.g., 44 hours/week} but then the consulting firm gets a sense of how many hours staff are truly working {probably 50u201370 hours}.You mentioned project profitability- while timesheets do prthe data to compute basic project profitability, there is a lot more to this topic. There are a couple of really key profit levers that would not be addressed via timesheet data: follow-on sales and staff retentionFollow-on rate: To the extent that a project leads to a string of future projects, that project was VERY profitable, as it decreased the overall cost of sales on future work. This has a major impact on overall profitability, so one must account for projectsu2022 differential follow-on rates in some way.Staff retention: good staff are very expensive to recruit and retain. Some projects can be real attrition machines (poor scope, poor leadership, unrealistic demands, etc) and firms need to understand if a given project can be logically tied to disproportionate staff attrition. If so, that project wasnu2019t nearly as profitable as it seemed via timesheet analysis. One analysis could be comparing billed hours versus total hours worked, and then for the outliers, note if there was higher attrition 6u201312 months later.Of course, there are other considerations as well but I wanted to highlight a couple that showed how timesheet data is necessary but not sufficient to understand project profitability.