Professional services
Time, billing and delivery each sit in their own system. Whether an engagement made money is a question that takes a week to answer.
Time, billing and delivery in one model
Engagement-level profitability
Reads your practice management system
Read-only by default
Where the money leaks
Each one is a measure that exists somewhere in your systems and cannot be trusted today.
Time is recorded in one place and money in another. Neither is wrong, but nothing joins them, so whether an engagement made money takes a week to answer.
By the time the numbers reconcile, the work is finished and the lesson is academic. The measure only matters if it is readable while there is still scope to change something.
Unbilled time plus unpaid invoices is the real cash position, and it usually sits between two teams who each see half of it.
What you will be able to see
Three or four of these are where the money actually moves. All of them are in your systems already.
By person and team, on a definition the partners agree with.
What was billed against what was recorded.
While the engagement is still live, not after it closes.
Unbilled time and unpaid invoices, together.
What is coming against who is free.
Where the revenue risk really sits.
Time is recorded in one system and money in another.
Neither system is wrong, but nothing joins them. Modeling both into one warehouse is usually the entire difference between guessing at engagement profitability and knowing it.
It will show up in week one, and better then than later. Where the data cannot support a measure, we say so instead of handing you a confident-looking number.
The engagement suits operations with real complexity across a handful of systems more than it suits headcount of any particular size.
Other sectors
Half an hour works out which measures are worth baselining and whether your systems can be read.
