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Industry · Professional services

The firm that knows its margin per client.

A direction for agencies, lawyers, consultancies, architects, and design studios. Billable hours, project pipelines, retainer mix — all readable on one panel. The instrument behind the invoices.

Billable utilisation
Margin per client
Project pipeline
Retainer health
Pro services Agencies · law · consultancies · design studios+18% Typical billable utilisation lift5-10 h Typical partner admin saved / week£10–40k Typical margin / yr 1
By practice type

Five flavours of the same instrument.

Same method, different shape. Pick the practice type closest to yours — each has a deep page with the sector-specific stack, proof, and how we measure.

The firm stack

Six instruments, calibrated to the firm.

Built for the businesses where the partner's time is the unit of revenue, where projects sprawl, and where the difference between a profitable client and a money-losing one hides in a Notion doc.

01 · Billable time

Hours that bill themselves.

Time tracking that's actually used. Per-project, per-client, per-partner. Live utilisation, not month-end shame.

  • Lightweight time capture
  • Project & retainer split
  • Live utilisation dashboard
  • Auto-invoice from approved hours
02 · Project pipeline

The pipeline, in one view.

Every active project, who's on it, what stage, what's blocking. The view the partner needs Monday morning, before standup.

  • Per-stage WIP
  • Owner & due-date tracking
  • Blocker & risk surface
  • Forecast next-quarter capacity
03 · Margin per client

The client that quietly loses money.

Revenue minus billable cost minus support overhead, per client, live. The conversation the firm needs to have but never has the data for.

  • Revenue & cost reconciliation
  • Per-client P&L
  • Underwater-client flagging
  • Retainer drift detection
04 · Client comms

One thread per client. One owner.

Email, Slack, WhatsApp, Notion comments — pulled into one client thread with SLA tracking. Nothing slips, nobody re-sends.

  • Multi-channel client thread
  • SLA & response tracking
  • Auto-status updates
  • Client portal (optional)
05 · Office

The firm, on one screen.

Live revenue, billable utilisation, cash position, partner draws, hire-trigger thresholds. Decide hires on signal, not gut.

  • Live P&L & cash
  • Per-partner utilisation
  • Hire-trigger model
  • Quarterly forecast
06 · BrainBase

The firm's knowledge, indexed.

Templates, SOPs, past deliverables, expert notes — searchable from the IDE, the brief, the client call. Junior productivity day one.

  • Template & deliverable library
  • Past-project search
  • Junior-onboarding tracks
  • AI-assisted retrieval
Sample engagement

The agency that fired its worst client.

Twelve people. Forty active projects. Margin invisible until quarter-end.

A creative agency ran on Notion for projects, Toggl for time, and a quarterly bookkeeper call for P&L. Two-week build: time-capture inside the project tool, live utilisation, per-client margin reconciliation. Six months in: identified two clients running 30% under cost, renegotiated one, fired the other. Eighteen percent utilisation lift across the team.

How we measure: per-client margin reconciled monthly across Toggl time entries, Xero billing, and direct-cost allocations; utilisation = billable / available hours, rolling 8-week average across nine staff.

+18%billable utilisation
+£68kmargin recovered, year one
2 clientsrepriced or removed
Adjacent industries

Different shape of the same problem.

If your work isn't exactly this, the nearest sectors share the rhythm. Or browse every industry we build for.

Map the firm.

Bring the time tracker and a recent client P&L. We diagnose from the numbers.