For consultancies and agencies
Know which projects actually pay
You sell time and expertise. The invoice tells you what you charged. It does not tell you what the job cost you, and in a firm running twenty projects at once that gap is where the margin goes.
The gap between the invoice and the margin
A consultancy or an agency sells hours and expertise, and almost everything that determines whether the year is a good one happens before the invoice is raised. Scope that grew. A pitch that took three weeks. A senior person on a job that was priced for a junior one.
None of that shows up in a profit and loss account. It shows up as a decent looking turnover figure and a bank balance that never quite matches it.
What we do
Project and client profitability, monthly. Fee against fully costed time by job and by client, so the pattern is visible while you can still act on it.
Recovery and utilisation. Not just how busy people were, but what the firm actually earned for the time it paid for.
Retainer and project mix. What the recurring base covers, and what the firm needs from project work to clear the rest.
Work in progress and unbilled time. Tracked as a number and billed, rather than discovered at year end and written off.
Cash weekly. Twelve weeks ahead. Project businesses are lumpy by nature and the lumpiness is predictable if anyone is looking.
The statutory work. Year end, corporation tax, payroll and VAT, prepared and signed by our qualified accountants.
Why this is the whole job for a firm that sells time
A firm selling product can read its margin off the price list. A firm selling time cannot, because the cost of the thing sold is buried in a timesheet nobody trusts and a payroll that is the same every month whatever happens.
That is why the reporting has to be built rather than run off. It is also why most firms your size have never seen it.
Who this is for
Consultancies, marketing and creative agencies, digital studios and other firms selling expertise, turning over £500k to £5m across Surrey, Sussex, Kent and the South East. Firms that have grown past the point where the founder can hold the numbers in their head, and firms that suspect a chunk of the client list is being carried by the rest of it.
If you want to see the structure of the monthly pack first, it is set out on the management accounts page. If you would rather have a written read of the business before speaking to anyone, The Outside View is free and built only from public sources.
Common questions
How do you work out whether a project made money? You compare the fee to the fully costed time actually spent on it, including the hours nobody wrote down, plus any pass through costs and the time spent winning it. AI Finance Partners builds that comparison monthly by job, so a consultancy or agency can see which work pays before it repeats the same scope on the next client rather than after the year end.
What utilisation rate should a consultancy or agency run at? There is no single right number, because it depends on how much of the team is billable and how much of the non billable time is business development that will pay later. The useful measure is recovery, meaning the fee actually earned against the cost of the time actually spent. A firm can run at high utilisation and still lose money if the recovery on that time is poor.
We are on retainers and projects. Does that make the numbers harder? It makes them more useful. Retainers give you a base you can plan against and projects give you the upside, and the mix between the two is one of the few things you can deliberately change. Reporting them separately shows whether the base is covering the fixed cost of the studio and the team, which is the question that actually matters.
Do you do the bookkeeping as well? Yes. Bookkeeping, payroll, VAT, year end accounts and tax are all part of the outsourced finance function, prepared and signed by qualified accountants. Some firms want all of it and some want only the monthly management accounts on top of a bookkeeper they already have. Both work.