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The fee was agreed in a corridor. The loss appeared in December.

A professional firm sells hours it does not measure, at prices it does not record, against budgets nobody compares. We put the engagement at the centre of the system, so utilisation, recovery and write-offs stop being opinions.

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What the day actually looks like

  • It is Thursday afternoon and half the team is reconstructing last week from their calendars, their sent items and their memory.

  • A partner agrees a fee on the way to the lift, and the engagement letter follows a fortnight later, if it follows at all.

  • The report is in its fourth draft, three weeks past the estimate, and nobody has told the client that the scope moved.

  • A subcontracted specialist invoices at a rate the file does not carry, and the person who agreed it has left the firm.

  • Work in progress stands at a number the managing partner does not believe, and gets written off at year end in one line.

Where it usually breaks

  1. Timesheets written on Thursday

    Nobody records time as it happens, so Thursday afternoon becomes an act of reconstruction from calendars and sent items. Hours land on whichever code is remembered, narratives read “ongoing work”, and when a client who reads narratives line by line queries the bill, the only defence is somebody recalling a fortnight ago.

  2. Utilisation is a debating point

    Every partner quotes a different figure because nobody ever defined the denominator. Is business development chargeable? Is a graduate in training at eighty per cent capacity or fifty? Is annual leave in or out? Until that is written down and applied the same way to everyone, utilisation is opinion with numbers attached.

  3. Fixed fees overrun in silence

    The estimate assumed four weeks of a manager and two of an associate. By week six nobody has compared the two, because the comparison exists only in a report produced after the engagement closes. The overrun surfaces at invoicing, and by then the choice is to absorb it or to have an argument.

  4. Work in progress nobody believes

    Unbilled time accumulates on files that stopped moving months ago. There is no age on it and no owner, so the balance is carried at full value until the year-end review writes off a large round number in one line. Nobody can say which engagements it came from, or whether it recurs.

  5. Pricing decided in a corridor

    A rate is agreed between a partner and a client on the way to the lift, discounted against a card the billing team has never seen, and reaches the system as a manual override with no note attached. Three months later another partner quotes the same client differently, and both of them are right.

How the work runs

  1. One engagement, one code

    Nothing starts without an engagement record carrying the scope, the fee basis, the budget by grade, the agreed rates and the approving partner. Conflict check and engagement letter are part of opening the code, not paperwork chased afterwards. If there is no code there is nowhere to book time, which settles the discipline quickly.

  2. Time entered daily

    Time goes in on the day, from a phone when the work is on a client site, against a code and with a narrative long enough to bill. The week then locks. We set the narrative standard with the people who answer client queries, because they already know which line always gets challenged.

  3. Budget visible on the file

    Budget against actual sits on the engagement, not in a monthly pack. When a fixed fee crosses the thresholds you set, the manager and the partner are told while a decision can still be made: reduce scope, raise a change order, or accept the cost knowingly. Silence stops being one of the options.

  4. WIP with age and owner

    Every unbilled hour carries an age, an owner and a next action. The billing meeting works an aged list rather than a single total, and a write-off needs a reason code and approval at the level that agreed the fee. Year end stops being the moment the firm learns what it gave away.

  5. Pricing on the record

    Rate cards, standard discounts and the authority to exceed them are written into an approval matrix and enforced in the system. Subcontracted specialists are engaged against the file at an agreed rate, so their cost sits on the engagement that bought it rather than in a general overhead line.

What changes once it holds

  • The utilisation figure the partner argues over is the one the timesheets produce.
  • A fixed fee that is overrunning says so in week three.
  • Work in progress carries an age and a named owner.
  • Time narratives survive a client who reads them line by line.
  • Discounts are approved on the record before the invoice is raised.
  • Subcontractor cost sits on the engagement that bought it.

Utilisation is a definition before it is a number

Firms argue about utilisation for years without noticing they are arguing about arithmetic nobody agreed. The numerator is easy: hours booked to a client code. The denominator is where the fight is. A firm that counts a forty-hour week and excludes leave, training and pitching will report a figure ten points above a firm that counts capacity gross, and neither is wrong. What matters is that one definition exists, is written down, applies to the graduate and the partner alike, and does not quietly change when the number disappoints. We fix the definition first and build the reporting second, because a report on an undefined measure produces arguments rather than decisions.

A fixed fee is a budget with a signature

Fixed-fee work does not fail at delivery. It fails in the second week, when a scope conversation happens verbally and nobody converts it into a change order. Ten days later the team is doing work that was never priced, and the partner learns about it when recovery is calculated. The remedy is unglamorous: a budget by grade recorded at the moment the fee is agreed, actuals posted daily against it, and an alert to a named person at the thresholds you choose. Not so the system can refuse the work — that decision belongs to a human — but so that absorbing an overrun becomes a choice somebody made rather than a fact discovered.

Retainers are the quietest leak

A retainer is priced on an assumption about volume, and the assumption is almost never revisited. In year one it is comfortable. By year three the client is calling twice a week, three additional entities have been added without a variation, and a partner is protecting a relationship by absorbing the difference. Because the fee arrives every month, no invoice ever prompts the question. We put consumption against the retainer on the same page as the fee, with scope written in terms somebody can measure, so the annual review has evidence in it. Some of those conversations are uncomfortable. All of them are cheaper than the alternative.

Questions we get asked

Our partners will not fill in timesheets. Is this doomed?
Not doomed, but do not pretend otherwise in the design. Partner time is usually the smallest volume and the highest value, so make the cost of entering it tiny: a phone, a running timer, defaults drawn from the calendar. Then make it visible. Most partners comply when their own recovery figure depends on it and their peers can see the gaps. A memo does not survive a busy month.
We bill fixed fees. Why track time at all?
Because the fee is your price and the time is your cost, and without the second you are pricing the next engagement from memory. Time on a fixed fee is not for billing. It is for knowing which kinds of work you are actually good at, which clients cost more than they appear to, and which quotation you should decline next year.
Can the system stop a partner discounting?
It can require the discount to be recorded, approved at the right level, and visible on the engagement. Whether it hard-blocks a senior partner is your decision rather than ours, and we will tell you what we usually see: a hard block gets bypassed by somebody raising the invoice manually. A logged exception with a monthly report changes behaviour more reliably.
How do you value work in progress without inventing revenue?
By keeping the two apart. Work in progress is recorded at cost or at standard rates, as your accounting policy states, and revenue recognition follows that policy rather than the hope. The system’s job is to show what is unbilled, how old it is and who owns it. What is recognised is a decision for your finance director and your auditor, and we build to the position they take.
Do we need an ERP, or practice management software?
Possibly neither, and we will say so if a configured project accounting module with disciplined timesheets covers it. Specialist practice management suits firms with heavy conflict checking, client money rules or regulator-specific files. A general ERP suits firms where procurement, subcontracting and payroll matter as much as chargeable hours. We take no licence commission either way.

What this industry usually needs

Tell us what is not working

Send one line about what is going wrong. On the first call we will tell you whether it is a system problem, a process problem or a governance problem — and which one to fix first. That call is free and it is not a sales meeting.

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