In my experience, that’s only if you are doing a staff augmentation type consulting. I absolutely refuse to be on a project where the client controls the project and the company I’m working for isn’t just giving high level businsss requirements status updates.

I will not touch a staff augmentation project - ever.

I only work on projects that for all intents and purposes are fixed fee projects where we sign a contract promising that we will deliver x for $y.

In some level of granularity, we track what stories are complete in Jira and alarm bells go off if the burn down isn’t trending correctly. But we aren’t logging every hour we spent in Salesforce.

This was true when I was working in the consulting department at AWS (ProServe) and is true now at a 3rd party AWS partner.

Lucky you, I have done that regardless of the project type, when the client wasn't happy with the x for $y delivery, and delays payments until having their beloved Excel sheets.

I have also had to provide technical support in escalation meetings, predating delivery of said sheets.

How would the spreadsheets of hours worked help if the contract was based on “did you meet the deliverables according to the contract”?

Wouldn’t it be a checklist of - these are the 5 requirements and they were/were not met?

Wouldn’t the spreadsheet be a list of requirements and not hours?

Because customers tend to want to map why the Ferrari they asked for is a Fiat with bandages, given the fixed price budget, and thus want to map each requirement to the work time spent on it, and expensed budget.

Then comes all the argumentation why all those hours were required for each item, due to project delivery challenges on either sides, decisions that would require even more work, needless efforts spent in stuff we shouldn't have done as part of fixed price, and so forth.