OndeWork

Professional services firms

What can AI do for a professional services firm?

A firm bills by the hour and still cannot say which hours were worth billing.

A professional services firm doing about $8M a year can report billable hours and realization, but usually cannot say which clients and engagement types actually carry margin once the unbilled hours, the scope creep, and the partner time nobody records are counted. Time entry knows what was logged, the invoice knows what was charged, and the difference between them is where the answer lives.

A consultant on about $140,000 fully loaded who gives away four hours a week to work nobody bills is roughly $13,000 a year, per person. It never shows up as a loss, because it was never recorded as anything at all.

Gaps worth checking

The right place to start is the one that is costing enough to matter.

The gap is usually between systems, not inside one.

Each system can be right on its own and still lose value in the handoff. These are the records that need to meet before you can see what the gap is costing.

  • Your time and billing system
  • Project or matter files
  • QuickBooks
  • Subcontractor and vendor invoices
  • The pipeline spreadsheet
  • Engagement letters and scopes

Named by what they do rather than by brand, because the brand matters less than whether the thing is connected to anything else.

What a professional services firm asks before they start

We already have utilization and realization reports. What else is there?

Those measure the hours that got recorded. They cannot see the work that was done and never entered, which in most firms is the larger number.

Do we have to change our time and billing system?

No. It usually holds the record you bill from, and that stays. The work is connecting it to what things actually cost.

Should we just hire a controller instead?

Possibly, and it is a fair question to ask first. A controller assembles answers from the information available. If that information is scattered across five systems, you are paying a senior salary to do reconciliation by hand.

Our engagements are all bespoke. Does that break the analysis?

No. Bespoke work still has patterns, usually by engagement type, by client size, or by who ran it. Those patterns are what you are looking for.

Who owns what gets built?

You do, and the data with it. No licence to buy and no long contract.

Everything we have written for professional services firms

6 articles, newest first.

What AI can do in other trades

The gap changes by trade. The rule does not: find the recurring loss, put a number on it, then decide whether it is worth fixing.

Which small gaps have become worth checking?

Find more cash

Enter your domain. See where cash may be slipping through and what to check first.

Have a question about a gap in your business? Contact us.