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Professional services

Billable utilisation just hit its lowest point in nineteen years.

Sixty-six point four percent. And the firms losing least are the ones that stopped relying on memory.

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$816.4B

quarterly US revenue for professional, scientific and technical services, up 6.4% on a year earlier.

Source: US Census Bureau: Quarterly Services Survey

What is happening

Billable hours are at a nineteen-year low, and the timesheets came in late again.

$104K A ten-person firm loses that a year from two unlogged hours a week each

At a $100 rate. At consulting rates the same leak is several times larger.

90-95% Of delivered hours actually reach an invoice

The rest is delivered, absorbed and forgotten. It does not appear as a loss anywhere, which is why it persists.

Leakage is a handoff problem

A late timesheet becomes an unbilled hour, which becomes a delayed invoice. Each handoff loses a little, and no single team owns the chain.

The talent pipeline is shrinking

US accounting graduates fell 6.6% against roughly 124,200 annual openings. Manual work is now competing for people who have options.

Intelligence, plumbed in

A week of work can be described from what already happened.

A connector to your ledger and calendars, one definition of billable in the layer, and nothing invoiced until you send it.

How we make AI survive real data
  • Connectors
  • A semantic layer
  • Evals you can check

What changes

Judge us on this, not on what we built.

Captured

Time recorded from work that already happened

Rather than reconstructed on Friday, when accuracy has already decayed by a quarter to a third.

Realisation

The delivered-to-billed gap measured and closed

Visible per engagement, per person and per client, while there is still something to do about it.

Retention

Less of the week spent re-keying

Which is a retention argument as much as a margin one, in a market where replacing people is expensive and slow.

However hard, whatever it is

Billable hours are one example. Bring the question you cannot answer.

We wrote this about which work actually pays. If yours is resourcing, pipeline or a month-end that takes two weeks, the method holds.

  1. 01

    We sit with you

    Days where the work happens, not a workshop in a meeting room. We watch the job get done and write down the shortcuts nobody wrote down.

  2. 02

    We read everything

    Your data, your rules, your vendors and their documentation, and the published research on your sector. We report what is actually in there.

  3. 03

    We break it to first principles

    Not which tool fixes this. What is actually causing it, taken apart until we reach the piece that cannot be divided further.

  4. 04

    Then we build

    Weeks, not quarters. By this point we are not guessing what to build, and guessing is the thing that makes projects long.

Where we sit

Your accounts package stays. We build the view of which work actually pays.

4

What you get

  • Captured Time recorded from work that already happened
  • Realisation The delivered-to-billed gap measured and closed
  • Retention Less of the week spent re-keying
3

Built new for you — none of this exists in your stack today

  • A timesheet already filled in when they open it
  • A job board that shows margin, not just hours
  • A monthly pack that goes out without three people chasing it
2
The engagement layer Reads your ledger and time. Invoices nobody until you press send. Connectors, one agreed meaning per field, and a model reading what no field holds. Accuracy measured on your own records.
1
  • Xero
  • QuickBooks
  • Sage
  • NetSuite
  • Tally

What you already run — unchanged, and still yours

If it is in the ledger, we can reach it. A desktop accounts package, a timesheet in a spreadsheet, an invoice as a PDF. All of it can be joined.

  • No API
  • No documentation
  • A terminal from 1994
  • It arrives as paper
  • The vendor said no
  • It reports nothing

Not a list of limits. Name yours on the call.

And once we can reach it, a model can read it. Most of the value here is in the sources nobody ever structured — the note, the letter, the screen.

Who this is for

The people who feel this first

  • Managing Partner
  • Chief Operating Officer
  • Finance Director
  • Practice Leader
  • Head of Delivery

Straight answers

The questions you would ask on the call

  • Is this just another timesheet tool?

    No. A timesheet tool asks people to record time; the problem is that they do not, and no amount of reminding fixes it. Capture has to be derived from work that already leaves a trace, with the person confirming rather than composing.

  • How quickly does this pay back?

    Calculate it from your own figures. Multiply your fee earners by two hours a week by your blended rate. That is the conservative case, and most firms leak more than two.

  • Do you work with firms outside the US?

    Yes. We work with US, European and Indian firms. The leakage problem is identical in all three — only the systems and the rates differ.

  • Can AI fill timesheets from what actually happened?

    It drafts them from your calendars and ledger. Nothing is billed until a person presses send. We measure the drafts against real weeks.

Next step

Start with your own numbers.

  1. We talk

    20 minutes. Free.

    You tell us what is not working. We ask how the work really gets done.

  2. We look at your data

    A few weeks.

    We read your systems, including the notes and letters no field holds. You get what is really in there, what it costs, and the accuracy we can hit.

  3. We build

    A few months.

    Only if step 2 says it is worth it. Fixed price, agreed before we start.