SERVICES

Industries

Professional Services

In a services business the inventory is time. We implement the systems that make utilisation, project profitability and revenue recognition visible weekly rather than at year-end.

Sector focus
Utilisation, project margin and revenue recognition without a spreadsheet in the middle.
Services most used here
Oracle NetSuite · Odoo ERP · Microsoft 365

What we find

The four problems we are usually called in about

Recognisable? Each one has a root cause in process or data design rather than in software capability.

01

Utilisation is known too late

Timesheets arrive weekly at best, so bench time and over-servicing are discovered after the month they occurred.

02

Project margin is opaque

Fee, cost, subcontractor spend and expenses sit in different places, so nobody knows which engagements actually earn.

03

Revenue recognition is manual

Milestone and percentage-of-completion revenue is calculated in a spreadsheet each period, and audit adjustments follow.

04

Pipeline and delivery are disconnected

Sales commits dates that resourcing cannot support, because CRM and delivery planning never meet.

How we fix it

What we actually configure for professional services

Not a capability list — the five specific design decisions that make the difference in this sector.

  • Project structure with fee, cost, resourcing and expense on one record
  • Mobile timesheet and expense capture with approval and policy rules
  • Automated revenue recognition — milestone, percentage-of-completion, subscription
  • Resource planning connected to CRM pipeline and probability
  • Utilisation, realisation and margin dashboards by person, project and client

Typical shift

Timesheet compliance

Chased weeklyAutomated reminder

Project margin

At closeLive

Revenue recognition

SpreadsheetSystem-generated

Indicative of engagements in this sector. Your baseline is measured during Discover, so the target is yours rather than an average.

Case study

One ledger for three entities, closed in four days

A spinning, weaving and garment group running three disconnected accounting systems consolidated onto a single NetSuite ledger — with a governed item master and export documentation generated from order data.

11→4Working days to close the group
11→1Item master variants consolidated
96%Export docs generated from order data
The blueprint stage was uncomfortable in the best way. They made us settle arguments about our own process before a single screen was configured — which is why the go-live was boring.
Group Chief Financial Officer · Vertically integrated textile group

FAQ

Professional Services, specifically

Yes, including blended engagements, retainers and milestone billing, each with the correct revenue-recognition treatment configured rather than calculated externally.

Yes — Dynamics 365, HubSpot or Salesforce, so an opportunity becomes a resourced project without re-keying, and pipeline feeds capacity planning.

Granular enough to bill and to learn, no more. Usually project plus task at 30-minute resolution. Anything finer collects resentment instead of data.

Next step

Talk to the lead who covers professional services

Forty-five minutes, no deck. Bring one process that frustrates you and we will tell you how we would approach it.

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