Utilisation that means four different things
Chargeable hours over available hours, where available is variously contracted hours, a standard year, or hours less holiday. Each produces a different number and each is used somewhere.
Professional services
Utilisation, realisation, lock-up and pipeline defined once and reported consistently.
In a people business almost every important number is an allocation: who was chargeable, at what rate, against which matter, with how much written off. Small differences in those rules change the picture enough to alter partner behaviour, which is exactly why the definitions need to be fixed in one place.
- One agreed utilisation and realisation definition across the firm
- Write-offs visible while work is in progress, not after billing
- Resourcing decisions made against weighted pipeline
- Lock-up reduced by acting on matter-level ageing weekly
We build the model that fixes them: time, billing, WIP and pipeline on one grain, with utilisation, realisation and effective rate defined once and reported consistently from practice group down to individual.
We work with law firms, accountancy and advisory practices, management and engineering consultancies, architecture practices and agencies, any organisation where margin is decided by how time is sold and recovered.
What goes wrong
Recurring failure modes in professional services
Write-offs discovered at billing
Realisation visible only once a bill is raised, so the commercial lesson arrives after the work is done and the client relationship has already absorbed the cost.
Pipeline disconnected from resourcing
A CRM pipeline with no link to capacity, so either people sit idle or work is won that cannot be staffed without subcontracting at low margin.
Lock-up reported too late to manage
WIP and debtor days reported monthly in aggregate, which is far too coarse to change behaviour on a specific matter while it still matters.
Metrics
Metrics and their definition errors
Each metric with its definition and the error that most often distorts it. If our reading is wrong for your business, that disagreement is a productive starting point.
| Metric | Definition | The trap |
|---|---|---|
| Utilisation | Chargeable hours over available hours for the period. | Fix the availability basis, for which contracted hours less statutory leave is the most defensible choice, and publish it next to the figure. |
| Realisation | Billed value over standard value of recorded time. | Must distinguish rate discount agreed at engagement from write-off at billing; combining them hides where margin is lost. |
| Effective hourly rate | Billed value over chargeable hours delivered. | On fixed-fee work this requires all hours against the engagement, including unbilled, or the rate is flattered. |
| Lock-up days | WIP days plus debtor days. | WIP ageing must be measured from the date work was performed, not the date it was entered into the system. |
| Pipeline weighted value | Expected value of open opportunities weighted by stage probability. | Stage probabilities need recalibrating against actual conversion periodically, otherwise the forecast is systematically optimistic. |
Use cases
What we typically build
Partner and practice dashboard
Utilisation, realisation, effective rate, lock-up and pipeline in one view with drill-through to matter and timekeeper, and definitions on the page.
Matter and project profitability
Contribution by matter including non-chargeable support effort and disbursements, with a clear view of fixed-fee performance against estimate.
Resourcing and capacity
Committed versus available capacity by skill and grade, joined to weighted pipeline so resourcing conversations happen before the win.
WIP and billing hygiene
Ageing, unbilled time, bill-ready indicators and write-off analysis by partner and matter type, surfaced weekly rather than at month-end.
Client portfolio analytics
Revenue concentration, cross-practice penetration, rate performance by client, and churn indicators.
Pricing support
Historic delivered cost by work type to inform fixed-fee quoting, with distribution rather than averages so quoting accounts for variance.
Integration
Source systems we connect to
- Practice management systems (Elite, Aderant, Intapp)
- Time recording systems
- Professional services automation (Kantata, Certinia)
- Finance systems (Dynamics 365, NetSuite, Sage)
- CRM (Dynamics 365, Salesforce, HubSpot)
- HR and resourcing systems
- Billing and e-billing platforms
Regulatory context
Regulatory context by market
- UK: SRA Accounts Rules for client money reporting in law firms; FRC audit requirements for accountancy practices
- EU and UK GDPR: client confidentiality and legal professional privilege constraints on analytics access
- Germany: Berufsrecht confidentiality obligations for Rechtsanwälte and Wirtschaftsprüfer
- Switzerland: professional secrecy obligations and revFADP
- Ireland: Law Society of Ireland accounts regulations
- Cross-cutting: anti-money-laundering client due diligence record-keeping
Questions
Professional services: common questions
Yes, with deliberate design: individuals see their own detail, team leaders see their team, and firm-wide views are aggregated. The rules are agreed and published before launch. Where a culture is sensitive to individual metrics, we start at team grain and introduce individual views only with leadership agreement.
Because the questions that matter cross systems. Realisation needs time and billing; resourcing needs pipeline and capacity; client profitability needs finance and disbursements. A practice management report can answer within its own boundary and little beyond it. If your questions genuinely sit inside one system, we will say so.
By modelling engagement economics separately from time value: delivered cost against fee, with hours still captured for effective rate and for future pricing. The pricing feedback loop, meaning what this work type actually costs to deliver and how widely that varies, is usually the highest-value output.
It is a design constraint, not a blocker. Matter-level confidentiality and information barriers are implemented as row-level security driven by your existing matter access lists, so analytics inherits the same restrictions as the practice management system rather than creating a side door around them.
Services that apply here
Power BISemantic modelling, DAX and report delivery with one agreed definition per measure.Managed serviceMonitoring, incident response and change delivery for Power BI, Fabric and Azure platforms.GovernanceOwnership, cataloguing, classification and access evidence, implemented in the tools teams already use.
Next step
Analytics work in professional services
A 45-minute working session with an engineer rather than a sales call. You describe the problem; we set out what we would build, in what order, and what it is likely to cost.
Answered within one working day, by the engineer who would do the work