Process automation
Removing the approvals, handoffs, follow-ups, and reconciliation that quietly consume your team's week.
How it worksAll industries
Services and delivery
You are selling hours you cannot account for.
Engagement structure, time and expense capture, utilisation, work in progress, and milestone billing in one system rather than four spreadsheets and a memory.
Where the standard system leaves the cost in place.
A consulting, audit, design, or engineering practice has one thing to sell and it expires every evening. Capacity is the inventory, and unlike a warehouse it cannot be counted, cannot be carried forward, and leaves no trace when it is wasted. Most firms discover the shape of a month after it has closed: which engagements ran over, who was underloaded, what is sitting unbilled. By then the hours are gone. The system that would have shown it in time usually exists as a timesheet nobody fills in until Friday. None of these look like software problems. All of them are paid for in either unbilled time or a write-off at the end of an engagement.
- Timesheets are completed from memory at the end of the week, so the hours recorded are a reconstruction rather than a record, and nobody trusts them enough to bill from them.
- Utilisation is calculated monthly in a spreadsheet, so a consultant sitting at forty percent is discovered a month after the gap could have been filled.
- Work in progress is whatever the engagement partner remembers is unbilled, so revenue slips between periods and cash arrives later than it needed to.
- Scope changes are agreed in a call and absorbed in the delivery, with no record linking the extra work to the conversation that authorised it.
- Engagement margin is known for the practice in aggregate and for no individual engagement, so the work that loses money keeps being sold.
Built for professional services.
Built on the same core our products run on, extended with the records and rules this sector is actually judged against. These are scopes we build and integrate, not shelf modules with a licence key.
Engagement and scope structure
Engagements held as structured records with phases, deliverables, assigned roles, agreed rates, and budget by phase, so what was sold is a thing the system knows rather than a PDF in a folder.
Time and expense capture
Capture built to be completed daily in under a minute, from a phone or a browser, against a task that already exists. This is the module that decides whether the rest works: hours entered a week late are an estimate, and an estimate cannot be billed with a straight face.
Capacity and utilisation
Committed, available, and billable time by person and by week, forward-looking rather than retrospective, so a gap in three weeks is a staffing decision now instead of a variance later.
Work in progress and revenue
Unbilled time and expense visible per engagement as it accumulates, with recognition, accruals, and deferrals following the contract rather than following whoever raises the invoice.
Retainers, milestones and rate cards
Fixed fee, milestone, retainer, and time-and-material engagements billed on their own terms, with client-specific and role-specific rates applied by the system and retainer drawdown tracked against consumption.
Engagement margin and change control
Cost against fee per engagement, including subcontracted and pass-through work, with scope changes raised as records that carry a fee impact instead of being absorbed silently by the delivery team.
What it has to be able to prove.
Compliance fails when it is a parallel activity. These obligations are carried by the system that runs the operation, so the evidence exists because of how work was recorded rather than because someone assembled it afterwards.
Client confidentiality by construction
Engagement-level access control, so a consultant sees the client files they are staffed on and no others, with a logged trail of who opened what. In practices that serve competing clients this is a contractual obligation, not an internal preference.
Personal data held on instruction
A professional firm processes its clients' personal data on their instruction rather than its own. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act that is a distinct position with its own obligations, and the system carries what it needs to answer them: what is held, for which engagement, under what retention, and deletion as a function rather than a manual scramble.
Evidence of what was agreed and delivered
Statements of work, approvals, acceptance, and change records linked to the engagement they belong to, which is what a fee dispute, a professional indemnity claim, or a regulator's file review actually examines.
What it runs on.
The sector layer is built. The operational core underneath it is not a proposal: it is running in production with clients today.
ERPMachERPLiveThe operational spine, extended with engagement, time, utilisation, and work-in-progress structures. Only one product is named here, deliberately: a consulting practice holds no stock, and listing an inventory system beside it to make the row look fuller would be padding.See what it does
What it returns.
Hours become a record rather than a recollection
Capture that takes under a minute at the point of work produces timesheets accurate enough to bill from without an argument.
Idle capacity is visible while it is still bookable
Utilisation runs forward as well as backward, so a gap is a staffing decision rather than a month-end finding.
Engagement margin stops being an average
Cost against fee is known per engagement, which is the only level at which the decision to keep selling that work can be made.
Where this normally starts.
Which of these applies depends on how well the constraint is already understood. A review that finds the real one usually turns into a build.
Data and reporting
Turning scattered records into dependable, current reporting that leaders can act on rather than argue about.
How it worksQuestions we actually get asked.
Our people will not fill in timesheets. How is this different?
It is the constraint the whole design has to answer, so we treat it as a product problem rather than a discipline problem. Capture happens against tasks that already exist, on a phone, in seconds, with the week pre-populated from what someone was scheduled to do. If entering time takes longer than that, it will be done on Friday from memory and the data will be worth very little, which is the situation most firms are already in.
We bill fixed fee, not hourly. Does time tracking still matter?
It matters more. On a fixed fee the hours are your cost rather than your invoice, so without them you know the revenue on an engagement and not the margin. Firms that move to fixed fee without tracking effort usually find out which engagements were unprofitable only after repeating them.
Can this coexist with our accounting software?
Yes, and that is the usual shape. The gap in most practices is not the ledger, it is everything upstream of it: engagements, time, work in progress, and billing. We build that layer and post the outcome to whatever you already keep the books in.