Where this usually lands in our work: pipeline and forecasting, reporting and analytics and custom development.
Most firms can tell you revenue without blinking. Far fewer can say, on a Wednesday, which engagements are currently making money. That gap is rarely an accounting failure. It is that the CRM, the delivery system and the invoicing system were bought in different years by different people, so utilization gets reassembled in a spreadsheet once the month has already closed.
Put time, rates, resourcing and invoicing on the same platform as the pipeline and the answer stops being archaeology. Bill rate and cost rate are configured separately, so margin is calculated rather than assumed. Support time logged against an entitlement lands in the same utilization picture as project time, which is usually the first thing a services firm discovers it was never counting.
Pipeline in the CRM, delivery in a project tool, hours in a third place, invoices in a fourth. Every boundary between them is a re-keying step, and every re-keying step is somewhere the margin number quietly stops being trustworthy.
We put time entry and timesheet approval, bill rates and cost rates, retainers, resourcing and invoicing onto the same records as the opportunity that created the work. Project planning sits there too — dependencies, baselines, critical path, RAID — and so does the support time logged against an entitlement, which is usually the first thing a firm realizes it was never counting. Utilization and project margin become numbers the system produces rather than numbers somebody reassembles once the month has closed.
Beyond phase one
The partner who signs the invoice usually spots these long before the delivery lead does.
Everyone has a week of hours sitting against the wrong engagement and no tidy way to move them. A bulk move tool with filters and sort is twenty minutes of build and it is the single most used thing we ship. It never once appeared in a requirements document.
Over-budget usually arrives as a line in a monthly report, by which point the conversation with the client is already awkward. Put overdue and over-budget warnings on the project record itself, next to the burndown, and the delivery lead sees it the week it happens rather than the month after.
Plenty of firms track what they charge and infer what it cost. Configure the two separately and realization, effective rate and project margin become numbers the system produces rather than numbers finance reconstructs.
Rather than granting by job title, grant by who is named where. A proposal manager gets edit on the proposal and read on the project; a project manager gets the reverse. Reassign the engagement and access moves with it, which means delivery people can have real visibility without exposing the whole book.
Most accounting connectors fail quietly and somebody notices at month end. Configure the connector to log every run with its request and response, default the view to today’s errors, and let your own admin select the failures and reprocess them without opening a ticket with anybody.
The billing system, the delivery tool and the pipeline are rarely the same system, and nobody wants to consolidate them in one go. We build the commercial record in Salesforce and join it to what you already run, so sold, delivered and invoiced finally reconcile. These are the categories we most often connect.
Utilization, rates and WIP, so a won deal becomes a staffed, billable engagement.
Kantata · Deltek Vantagepoint · Unanet · BigTime
Revenue recognition and project accounting, with bookings and billings telling the same story.
Sage Intacct NetSuite QuickBooks Online Advanced Dynamics 365 Business Central
Where the work is actually tracked, reconciled with the account that bought it.
Asana Monday.com Smartsheet Wrike
Who is available against a weighted pipeline, instead of against a hopeful spreadsheet.
Float Resource Guru Productive
Services firms win on documents. Version and signature status belong on the opportunity.
PandaDoc Proposify Responsive Loopio
For associations, where dues, events and certification live alongside non-dues revenue.
iMIS Impexium GrowthZone
We will look at how time gets captured on it, what the bill and cost rates really are, and the point where the invoice parted company with the work. You will know either way by the end of the call.
