Activity rate (excluding leave)
Billed days over working days available after planned leave is removed. The activity rate French consultancies compare month to month.
Definition
The activity rate excluding leave is the share of available working days a consultancy actually billed, once planned leave is taken out of the denominator. Vacation days, public holidays and other planned rest days are subtracted up front, so a month where everyone is on holiday does not look like a month where everyone was idle.
This activity-rate convention is management practice, not a legal definition: no labour convention or standards body defines it; the Syntec labour convention (IDCC 1486) governs salaries and leave, not activity ratios. It comes from the management guides firms use to steer staffing, and it always travels with its sibling, the including-leave rate, which keeps leave inside the denominator. The pair exists because the two answers serve different conversations: the excluding-leave rate for month-to-month comparison, the including-leave rate for total-capacity questions.
Formula
Activity rate = billed days / (potential working days - planned leave) x 100
Example: A consultant bills 12 days in a month with 20 working days and 3 days of planned leave: 12 / (20 - 3) = 71 %.
Why it matters
Because planned leave is out of the denominator, the activity rate stays comparable across months. July and May look similar when the team is equally productive, which is exactly what a monthly steering meeting needs. Chargeability or utilization rates that keep leave inside the denominator swing with the holiday calendar and invite pointless arguments about whose month was worse.
One warning: practice disagrees about sick leave. Some firms also remove unplanned absences from the denominator, others keep them in and let them pull the rate down. Pick one convention, write it down, and keep it stable, or two departments will compute two activity rates and both will be right.
What moves the activity rate
- 1
Record leave before it happens. A planned absence removed from the denominator is honest; one discovered at month-end is a fight about the number.
- 2
Shorten the gap between a mission ending and the next one starting. Every idle week is a denominator day with no numerator behind it.
- 3
Validate timesheets weekly instead of monthly. Unlogged billed days are billed days that arrive in the wrong period.
How Okouro shows it
Okouro computes this ratio continuously: validated timesheets feed the numerator, recorded leave and the working calendar shape the denominator, and the billability shown on the executive dashboard uses the same net-of-leave convention everywhere.