Industries
Professional Services
A professional firm sells time it cannot restock and cannot easily measure. Which is why so many firms know their revenue precisely, their utilisation approximately, and their realised margin per engagement not at all.
The situation
What we usually find
For consulting, engineering, legal, accounting and advisory firms billing time and expertise against fixed and variable fees.
The economics of a firm are decided by three numbers: how much of available time is billable, how much of billed time is recovered, and how much of the fee survives to the bottom line once delivery is done. All three depend on timesheets, which are the least popular administrative act in any firm and the first thing to slip when people are busy.
The consequence is a lag. Work is delivered, time is recorded late or not at all, the invoice is raised on a fee agreed months earlier, and the true margin becomes visible after the engagement has closed and the same terms have already been quoted to the next client.
For firms that are themselves in finance and accounting, there is a second layer: the client work runs on client systems, each different, and the firm carries the cost of maintaining competence across all of them.
How the work flows
Where the pressure points are
Every business in this sector runs a version of this cycle. These are the points where it strains when the systems behind it do not join up — and where the value of joining them up shows first.
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Pitch
Fees quoted from a rate card rather than from what similar work actually consumed
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Resource
Who is available and who is overloaded known by asking around, not by looking
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Deliver
Scope expanding through goodwill, with no record of when it started
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Record
Timesheets completed at the end of the month, from memory
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Recover
Write-offs taken quietly at invoicing and never fed back into pricing
What you would run
The products behind it
Not every product, and never one we cannot justify for your operation. These are the ones that fit this sector, and the reason each one is here.
TeamKazi
Built precisely for this: a live profit and loss on every engagement, timesheets people will actually complete, and a margin position that updates as the work happens rather than after it. If your firm bills time against agreed fees, start here.
AscendBooks
For accounting and advisory firms specifically — a managed ERP platform your firm runs client work on, so you are not maintaining competence across a dozen different client systems. WIZAG built it and holds full copyright to it.
WizCRM
Where the firm has a genuine business development function and the pipeline currently lives in individual partners’ heads.
Sage Business Cloud
The firm’s own books, kept properly, with the audit trail a professional practice is expected to be able to produce.
What we would bring
The work around the software
The products are only half of it. These are the practices an engagement in this sector actually draws on, and what each one does here.
Process & Operational Excellence
Engagement setup, scope change and approval are process problems. A firm that cannot say when scope moved cannot bill for it.
Data, Analytics & Business Intelligence
Utilisation, realisation and margin by engagement, client and team — the three numbers that decide whether a firm grows profitably or just grows.
Executive Technology Services
For firms whose technology decisions currently rest with whichever partner has the strongest opinion.
AI & Intelligent Automation
Document-heavy professional work is well suited to intelligent capture and classification, which returns chargeable hours to fee earners.
Where we'd start
The first move
We would take three completed engagements — one that went well, one that overran, one where nobody is sure — and rebuild the actual margin on each from the time recorded. The gap between that and what was assumed at pricing is normally the entire business case.
Where we are not the answer
We are not a practice management vendor for regulated legal case management or a specialist audit toolset, and we do not replace the professional software your discipline requires. Where you run those, we integrate with them. Our work is the commercial layer — what the work costs, what it recovers, and what that should change about pricing.
Is this how your operation runs?
Tell us where it strains, and we will tell you plainly which of this is relevant to you and which of it is not — before you commit to anything.
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