Professional services analytics for firms that sell time.

Professional services firms sell time. Every meaningful operational decision — pricing, hiring, promotion, panel appointments, matter staffing — turns on how effectively that time is being used and how much of it is being converted into billed revenue. Our professional services analytics work is built for firms that want a proper picture of both, without waiting for finance to close the month.

The metrics every firm should have live

The core numbers are the same across law, accountancy and consulting. Utilisation, chargeable hours, standard versus actual rate, realisation, write-offs, WIP, lock-up, debtor days, and matter or engagement profitability. Beneath those sit pipeline and origination, client concentration, sector mix, fee earner productivity and leverage, and the ratios that governance committees care about — for example partner-to-associate leverage, or the split of revenue by practice group.

None of this is unusual, and nearly every firm produces versions of these numbers already. What most firms lack is a single, trusted source, refreshed daily, cut consistently across offices, departments and fee earners, and drillable from firm-wide down to an individual matter.

Where the data usually lives

Practice management in Elite 3E, Aderant Expert, Iris, Practice Evolve, Osprey or Actionstep. Time recording in the PMS or in a dedicated app like Intapp Time or Carpe Diem. Case and matter systems for larger firms. Finance in the PMS or in a separate ledger. HR in Cascade, HiBob, Bamboo or Sage People. CRM in InterAction, Salesforce or HubSpot. The useful analytics is not any one of these — it is the shape you get when they are joined together properly.

Our default is a small Microsoft Fabric or Azure warehouse with clean fee earner, client, matter, department and time dimensions. The semantic model in Power BI carries the firm's definitions of utilisation, realisation and profitability so that heads of department, MPs and the finance director stop arguing about which version of the number is right.

Utilisation, realisation and lock-up

The single most useful dashboard in most firms is a live utilisation and realisation view by fee earner, matter and department. The second is a lock-up dashboard that shows unbilled WIP and debtors by partner, split by age. Between them, these two views drive conversations that used to happen quarterly and now happen weekly, and the cash impact of that alone tends to pay for the platform inside a year.

Matter and client profitability

Matter profitability is the analytics conversation that professional services firms have needed to have for a decade and have mostly avoided because the data was too messy. It does not need to be. Once time, fees, disbursements and cost recoveries are joined on matter, and standard rate uplifts and write-offs are applied consistently, the firm can see which matter types, sectors and clients actually make money. That is the analytics that changes how a firm prices new work.

Accountants and management consultancies

Accountancy firms use the same platform shape, with a reporting layer tuned to compliance versus advisory mix, recovery on fixed fee jobs, and job budget attainment. Management consultancies focus more on project margin, staffing pipeline, bench and delivery versus sold hours. Underneath, the data model is the same conformed set of people, clients, engagements and time.

Related reading

Our data analytics for accountants guide covers the accountancy side in detail, and the HR reporting guide walks through the workforce metrics that matter most in people-intensive businesses.