The Toughest Reader on the Bill: A Team Lead’s Verdict at Tyson & Mendes

Michelle Campbell reads billing for a living, in a sense. As a team lead at Tyson & Mendes she reviews her team’s pre-bills every month, and she is exacting about what survives an insurance carrier’s audit: the strategic why behind every task, the words compliance flags, the phrasing that invites a cut. It makes her the hardest audience a drafted time entry could ask for.

Her verdict: “Hourglass does a really good job of picking up the right terminology for an entry. It used to be where I would try to revise specific entries. I’ve gotten a little more lax on that.”

The hardest hours to capture

A team lead’s billable day resists timekeeping. It isn’t drafting motions; it’s oversight: reviewing what the team sends up, forming the strategy, and directing it, much of it by email. “That’s my bread and butter,” she says. “That’s how I capture my time.”

Which is why her favorite capture is the one that follows exactly that work. “When I email my team, this is what we need to do, one, two, three, four, five, Hourglass picks it up and it tells me exactly what I did. And that’s glorious.”

Meetings get the same treatment, drafted as a “meet regarding” entry she keeps as-is: “I love that it just says that.”

Documented. It happened

The moment that says the most arrived mid-conversation: on the phone with another partner, she watched the drafted entry for the call land while they were still on it, and the two of them celebrated it together, out loud. When the record keeps itself, an entry showing up is a small victory: time that used to be reconstructed later, or lost, already written.