Software for firms that sell expertise and have to deliver it on a fee
A professional services firm has a simple economic engine and a hard operational one: sell a fee, staff it, deliver it, collect it. The hard part is that all four happen at once across a dozen projects, and the only place they meet is a spreadsheet the partner maintains and nobody else trusts.
The four numbers a partner is always asked for
- 01What have we sold, and what is still to be delivered against it
- 02Who is on what, and are they over- or under-committed
- 03What has this engagement cost us in people so far
- 04What has been invoiced, what has been collected, what is overdue
- 05And the fifth, which nobody can answer quickly: which engagements are actually profitable
What actually changes on the Monday after
- The partner's spreadsheet is the only place fees, staff and deliverables meet
- A deliverable is accepted by email and the invoice is raised from memory
- Nobody knows what a project cost in staff time until it is over
- Leads live in one tool, projects in another, the books in a third
- Fee, staff and deliverables on one project record
- The client accepts the deliverable and the milestone bills
- Staff time against the fee, while the project is still open
- Lead to won deal to project to invoice, on one account
The utilisation trap
Most firms measure utilisation because it is easy to measure. It answers whether people are busy, not whether the work is profitable — and a fully utilised team delivering an under-priced engagement is a firm losing money efficiently. Cost against fee, per engagement, is the number that matters, and it requires staff to carry a cost rather than only a name.
Deliverables that someone has to accept
The difference between a consultancy and a task board is that a consultancy owes specific things to specific clients, and getting them accepted is the event that unlocks the invoice. Modelling deliverables and acceptance is what turns a project tool into a delivery system. See project management.
A product that asks what you do
Consultancies run Ofivio Business, the product for every business outside architecture, engineering and construction. Nothing in it is preset: it asks what the firm does and tailors the stages, the job titles and the words to the answer. Its departments are Project Management, Manager, HR and Finance, and modules bought inside Ofivio from OfiMart add the rest — Business Development for leads, deals and quotations, and Accountant for double-entry books.
Firms that keep books for their clients
Accountants, management consultants and advisory firms often hold their clients' books as part of the service. Ofivio Essentials holds a set per client, hard-separated, alongside the firm's own — which is a genuinely awkward requirement for most accounting software.
The write-off nobody logs
Every professional services firm does unbilled work and almost none of them record it. The extra meeting, the third revision, the report re-cut because the client changed their mind — each is small, each is absorbed to protect the relationship, and none of them appears anywhere. At the end of the year the firm knows its margin is thinner than planned and cannot say where it went. Recording the work is not about billing all of it; it is about knowing which clients cost what.
Where firms this size usually start
| What is going wrong | Start here |
|---|---|
| Nobody can say what an engagement earned | Project management |
| The books are always a month behind | Accounting |
| Leave and letters take a day each | HR |
| The client says the deliverable was never accepted | Client portal |
Who this is not for
If you are on this list, Ofivio is the wrong purchase and we would rather you know now than in month three.
- Software product teams — sprints and releases are a different shape
- Firms billing purely hourly with no deliverables, where a time tracker is enough
- Staffing and recruitment businesses
- Any firm whose work has no client acceptance step
The products behind this
Questions people actually ask
Which product does a consultancy start with?
Does it do time-sheets?
Can we keep client books in it?
Keep reading
- Excel vs project management software — an honest accounting from people who love ExcelComparisons
- Ofivio vs Odoo, ClickUp, monday.com, Asana and MonographComparisons
- The new Ofivio, explained: three products, what each plan carries, and where the old products wentCompany
- Ofivio Business, explained: project management that shapes itself to what you doProducts
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