Services
Analytics for Professional Services: Utilisation and Realisation
Firms track utilisation because it is easy to measure, and then act as though it were the goal. The more useful pair is realisation — what proportion of recorded time is actually billed and collected — and margin by engagement type. A team that is busy and writing off a fifth of its hours has a scoping problem, not a capacity problem, and hiring against that reading makes it worse. Producing these weekly rather than quarterly is what turns them from reporting into management.
What usually breaks here
- Leads and referrals tracked in partners' memories, not a pipeline
- Proposals, engagements and files scattered across drives and email threads
- Utilisation and profitability per client unknown until year-end
- A web presence that undersells the calibre of the work
What changes
- Live dashboards refreshed automatically from source systems
- Conversion tracking from first touch to invoice, GDPR-conscious by design
- Agreed definitions and one metrics layer everyone reads from
- Attribution reporting tied to actual sales, not platform-reported conversions
- Threshold alerts on the metrics that matter — margins, stock cover, pipeline
Questions we get from this sector
It is incomplete rather than wrong. High utilisation with poor realisation means the firm is busy doing work it cannot bill, which looks healthy on a capacity chart and drains cash. The two have to be read together, and realisation is the one that reveals scoping problems.
By putting all delivery cost against the engagement, including the senior time nobody records and the non-billable work a demanding client generates. Firms consistently discover that a prestigious client is subsidised by several unglamorous ones, which is a pricing conversation rather than a reporting curiosity.
Weekly for pipeline and realisation, monthly for margin by engagement type. Quarterly reporting arrives after the decisions it should have informed, which is why most firms feel their reporting is accurate and useless at the same time.
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Tell us what is slowing your business down
Send us your goals and current setup. Within 48 hours you get a written assessment with a recommended approach, a realistic timeline and an honest budget range.