The hours you cannot see are the ones costing you
A services firm runs on two numbers: how much of your people's time is billable, and how much of what you bill you actually collect. In most firms both are known only after month-end, assembled from timesheets written on a Friday afternoon from memory, by which point the engagement that went wrong went wrong three weeks ago. We build the systems that surface utilisation and realisation while there is still time to act on them, capture time without asking anyone to enjoy it, and make twenty years of engagement history searchable. Firms we have worked with have seen operational efficiency improve by around 25% and client satisfaction scores rise by 40%.
What professional services teams are actually up against
Utilisation and realisation arrive too late
Partners see the numbers at month-end, in a spreadsheet assembled by someone in finance. By then a fixed-fee engagement has already overrun and the write-off is a fact rather than a decision. The metric is not hard to calculate — it is hard to get in front of the person who could still change the outcome.
Time capture nobody wants to do
Reconstructed timesheets lose real billable hours — commonly a few percent of revenue, sometimes far more in firms with heavy interruption work. Worse, they lose the detail that survives a client challenge on the invoice, which turns a billing conversation into a discount.
Knowledge locked inside past matters
The answer to today's question was written three years ago by someone who has since left. It sits in a document management system that searches filenames well and content badly, so the work gets redone at full cost. This is the strongest AI use case in the sector, and it is still the least implemented.
Clients expect a portal, not an email thread
Status by phone call, documents by attachment and invoices as a PDF surprise all read as opacity to a client who deals with better systems elsewhere. Sending confidential material through email also quietly undermines the security posture your engagement letter promises.
The billable hour under real pressure
AI is compressing exactly the work that used to fill junior hours — first-draft review, summarisation, document comparison. Firms that price by input are watching the input shrink. The ones adapting are moving toward fixed and outcome-based fees, which only works if you can predict cost per engagement from your own history.
How we answer those problems
Practice & project accounting
Work in progress, rate cards, budgets and realisation reporting in one place, tied to the engagement rather than to the month. Partners see burn against budget on a live dashboard, and fixed-fee work carries an alert before it crosses the line, not after.
Passive time capture
Calendar entries, email, calls and document activity assembled into a draft timesheet a fee earner reviews and approves in a few minutes. Nothing is billed without a human confirming it, but nobody starts from a blank week — which is where recoverable hours quietly disappear.
Knowledge retrieval across your own history
Search over matter files, precedents, advice notes and engagement records that answers questions and cites the source document. Permissions mirror your existing matter access exactly, so conflicts walls and client confidentiality survive the introduction of AI rather than being reasoned about afterwards.
Client portals & secure exchange
A branded portal for document exchange, e-signature, engagement status, approvals and invoices, with an audit trail on everything. It removes a large volume of status chasing from your team while giving the client the visibility they were going to ask for anyway.
Engagement profitability analytics
Margin by client, service line, partner and engagement type, with the write-offs attributed to where they originated. It tends to be uncomfortable reading: most firms find a client group they have been servicing below cost for years, and a service line quietly funding the rest.
Back-office and administrative support
Trained offshore support for billing preparation, document formatting, diary coordination, onboarding checks and client correspondence, working inside your systems under your confidentiality terms. It clears the administrative load from fee earners without adding permanent overhead.
Regulatory context
These regimes shape what can be built and how data moves. We design to them from the first architecture conversation, rather than retrofitting controls once something is already live.
Services we bring to professional services
Software built around how your business actually works — not bent to fit somebody else's product roadmap.
Straight answers on where AI earns its keep in your business, which ideas to drop, and what it takes to run the survivors in production.
Trained remote teams for collections, customer service, admin and technical support — operational in days rather than months, at a meaningful discount to hiring the same capability locally.
A warehouse, tested transformations and one agreed definition of every metric — so the number in the meeting stops being an argument.
iOS and Android apps built to survive store review, OS upgrades and the second month — when most apps quietly lose their users.
Professional Services questions, answered
Last updated: August 31, 2026
That is normally the starting constraint, not an afterthought. We integrate with Clio, Elite 3E, Aderant, iManage, NetDocuments, Deltek, NetSuite, Xero and Practice Engine, among others. Where a system exposes a proper API we use it; where it does not, we build a controlled interface layer around the database rather than replacing a system your fee earners already know how to drive.
Start with the number your partners argue about
Realisation, write-offs, the engagements that always overrun, the hours everyone knows are going unrecorded. An hour with your team is usually enough to say which of those is a system problem and which is a pricing one.
Discuss your firm's systems