Most independent college counseling firms sell packages, not hours. A family buys the comprehensive package, the essay package, the junior-year package, and pays a fixed price. So why count the hours at all?
Because a package has a cost, and in most firms nobody knows it. The counselor who gives a family the twentieth hour of a fifteen-hour package does not notice; the owner who prices next year’s packages does it by feel. A timesheet would tell both, and nobody fills in a timesheet on Friday from memory. The hours have to be logged where the work happens, or they are not logged.
What the first firm asked for
Via logs time on the note of a call or a meeting: you write what was said, you give the entry a duration, and the minutes are on the student. We thought that was enough. In its first week on Via, the first firm asked for one more thing: that an entry say when it happened, not only how long it took.
The reason was simple once we heard it. Two counselors work with the same family. One logs thirty minutes on Tuesday, the other logs thirty minutes on Tuesday. Were those the same call, or two calls? With a start time the question answers itself, and Via can warn when two entries of one counselor overlap. So an entry now has a start, typed as a time or picked from the day’s times every quarter of an hour, defaulting to now minus the duration. The end is shown, never typed. Nothing in a counselor’s day is harder than typing “2:15 PM”.
Log it where the work happens
The habit that makes counting painless is not a timer. A timer has to be started, and the call that ran long is the one you forgot to start it for. The habit is this: the note comes first, and the time goes on the note.
- A call: the note of the call carries the minutes. You write the two lines about what was agreed, you give it thirty minutes, you close it. The time is logged.
- A meeting: the same, with the start the meeting had.
- Anything without a note, the hour spent reading a draft, the research for a list: the student’s Time tab, with a start and a duration.
Every entry carries its billing state, so what is unbilled stands at the top of the Time tab, this month and overall. That is the whole system. No sheet, no Friday.
What the report shows
Once the hours are on the students, the report is simply there. Via adds them up per student, per counselor and per month, and sets each student’s hours against the package the family bought.
Three things come out of it every time:
- The package that costs more than it sells. One package in the list is always in red. It is usually the one the firm has sold the longest, priced in a year when the counselor was faster.
- The counselor who gives time away. Not a problem to fix by a rule, but a conversation to have with numbers instead of impressions.
- Next year’s price list. Written from the average hours per package, not from what the firm across town charges.
A firm of 300 students carries about a thousand hours of counseling a year in those packages. Knowing where they go is worth more than the few minutes a day it takes to log them where the work happens.
How the hours work in Via, part by part, with the report.