Industry

Professional Services Software Development

Where the product is people's time.

In a professional services firm the inventory is billable hours, and the single largest source of lost revenue is time that was worked and never recorded. Everything else — utilisation, profitability by client, resourcing — is downstream of that one number being right.

The second problem is that the same engagement is viewed differently by everyone. A partner wants margin, a project lead wants capacity, finance wants work in progress and the client wants a defensible invoice, and all four views have to come from the same underlying record.

We build practice management systems: time and expense capture, engagement and matter management, resourcing, billing with the arrangements firms actually use, and reporting that reconciles those views.

Common challenges

What tends to go wrong

Time capture fails when it is a chore. Anything that requires opening a separate system and remembering what happened three days ago produces estimates rather than records, and estimates round downwards.Billing arrangements are rarely simple. Fixed fees with scope caps, retainers that roll over, blended rates, discounts by client and by matter, and disbursements each have their own rules, and firms usually have several of them running at once.Client confidentiality can require genuine separation. Conflict checks and information barriers are not merely permission settings in some professions; they are obligations with consequences.

How we address it

What we build instead

We make time capture take seconds and happen where the work already is — a timer in the tool being used, capture from calendar entries, and a weekly view that makes gaps obvious rather than requiring recall.Billing rules are modelled as data with effective dates rather than encoded in logic, so a new arrangement is configuration rather than a release, and historical invoices can still be explained under the rules that applied at the time.Where confidentiality requires it, access restrictions are enforced at the query layer and reads are logged, so an information barrier is demonstrable rather than asserted.

Outcomes

What typically improves

Recorded hours move closer to worked hours, which is the most direct revenue improvement available to a services firm and requires no change in how much work is done.Utilisation and profitability become numbers people trust enough to make resourcing decisions with, rather than figures that get argued about at month end.

Case studies

Work in Professional Services

Frequently asked questions

Will our staff actually record their time?

Only if it is faster than not doing it. That means capture inside the tools they already use, sensible defaults from calendar and activity, and a weekly review that surfaces gaps rather than demanding recall. Compliance is a design problem before it is a management problem.

Can you handle our billing arrangements?

Usually, provided they are written down. Fixed fees, caps, retainers, blended rates and client-specific discounts are all modellable — the difficulty is that firms often have arrangements that exist only as an understanding between a partner and a client. Getting those articulated is part of the work.

Can it integrate with our accounting system?

Yes, and that is normally the right structure: the practice system owns time, matters and billing; the accounting system stays the financial record. Invoices and payments synchronise between them rather than being entered twice.

Building for professional services?

Tell us how the operation runs today. We will tell you where software would actually help.

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