For professional services firms
Agencies, consultancies and accounting practices sell time rather than units, so the unit of work is the engagement rather than the task. Every project is slightly bespoke, profitability is decided by hours nobody enjoys recording, and the client asks "where are we at?" often enough that the answer needs to exist without anyone assembling it.
The unit of work is the billable engagement
Everything else follows from that. The lifecycle it moves through:
- 1Proposal, usually reworked twice
- 2Scope and rate agreed
- 3Delivery across a team
- 4Hours recorded, often late
- 5Invoice reconciled against those hours
- 6The client asks where things are
Where it actually leaks
Scope grows one conversation at a time
A client asks for something reasonable mid-engagement. Someone says yes, reasonably. It is never formalised, and the overrun is discovered when the invoice does not cover the effort. It is rarely one bad decision — it is the absence of a running total anyone can see.
Hours recorded from memory are fiction
Timesheets filled in on Friday for a week that happened are an estimate, and margin is calculated from them. The fix is not discipline; it is recording time near the work rather than near the deadline.
The engagement lives in six systems
Proposal in a document, project in a tracker, hours in a timesheet, files in storage, conversation in email, invoice in accounting. No single place answers "is this project going well?", so someone assembles that monthly — usually too late to change the outcome.
The tools built for this, honestly
- Kantata — proper resource forecasting and utilisation. Above roughly fifty billable people that specialisation earns its cost.
- Accelo — built for services businesses end to end, and strong where quote-to-invoice is the whole problem.
- Karbon — if you are an accounting practice, evaluate this before anything general-purpose.
What WaymakerOS covers
Commander (the productivity suite) runs the company around the work: business email on your own domain, documents, contacts, tasks, goals, forms and the org chart. Host (the build layer) is where the one process that is genuinely yours runs, with access to the same data rather than a copy of it. One (the AI intelligence layer) reads across both.
From $19 per user per month, with every tier including all 20 Commander tools.
What we do not do
- —Resource forecasting and utilisation reporting as a discipline. Above about fifty billable people, buy Kantata or Accelo — you will feel the gap quickly.
- —Accounting-practice workflow. Karbon matches the regulatory reality better than a general platform will.
- —Time tracking as a specialist product. We hold time against work; we are not a substitute for a dedicated timesheet system if that is genuinely your bottleneck.
The realistic setup for most operators is both: the vertical tool for the work it was built for, and a business platform for the company around it — with a deliberate decision about which system owns each piece of information.
Frequently asked questions
- What software do professional services firms need?
- Something that holds the whole engagement — proposal, project, time, deliverables and invoice — rather than the middle of it. Most firms have the middle covered and leave the two most expensive ends, the proposal and the reconciliation, running on documents and memory.
- Do agencies need professional services automation software?
- Above roughly fifty billable people, usually yes: resource forecasting and utilisation become their own discipline. Below that, PSA software typically costs more in administration than it returns, and a general platform holding projects, time and documents fits better.
- How do consultancies lose money on projects?
- In scope agreed verbally and documented late. Margin is set at quoting and eroded during delivery, and because the two live in different systems the comparison happens after completion rather than while there is still time to act.
- Does a small consultancy need a CRM?
- It needs the function, not necessarily the product. For a handful of consultants, a contact record attached to the projects and proposals already in your platform does the job. A dedicated CRM earns its place once selling is a distinct discipline from delivery.