Professional services live and die on utilization.
For accounting, legal, engineering, and IT firms: better utilization, cleaner handoffs, and billing that captures the work.
Free Business Scorecard →Where does a firm that bills by the hour actually lose money?
In a firm that bills for time, every unbilled hour is gone permanently. Del Val Investment Group looks at how work is captured, handed off, and invoiced. Manny built the time-billing process and KPI dashboards at a managed services provider, and cut enterprise client onboarding from 14 weeks to 10 at Citrix.
Does this sound familiar?
- Time gets logged late, or not at all, and the detail is gone.
- Client onboarding takes weeks before any billable work starts.
- Nobody can see utilization until the month closes.
- Work sits waiting for a review that nobody is chasing.
What we can point to
- At Citrix Managed Services, Manny reduced enterprise client onboarding from 14 weeks to 10 weeks — a 28% gain that pulled revenue forward on every account.
- Manny created a time-billing process and KPI dashboards at an MSP that increased project time-billing revenue — delivered during his prior technology/MSP leadership career.
- Manny designed project and portfolio dashboards that exposed resource constraints, budget issues, risks, milestones, and progress for faster decisions — delivered during his prior technology/MSP leadership career.
- Manny designed a client-onboarding workflow that reduced onboarding duration by three weeks — delivered during his prior technology/MSP leadership career.
Frequently asked questions
How do I reduce client onboarding time?
Onboarding stalls on missing prerequisites and unclear ownership, not on the work itself. Write down what must be true before work starts, collect it in one pass, and give one person the handoff. That approach took enterprise onboarding from 14 weeks to 10.
How do I improve utilization without pushing people harder?
Most lost utilization is administrative, not effort. Time captured late loses detail and gets written down. Fix capture at the point of work and utilization rises without anyone working longer.
How do I make more money in my accounting or consulting firm?
Bill for what you already do. Between unlogged time, scope creep absorbed for free, and slow onboarding delaying revenue, most firms are leaving real money on the table before they ever need a new client.
Not sure this is your biggest problem?
Score all three in about 2 minutes and find out which one is costing you most.
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