Nobody knows which engagements made money
Margin needs loaded cost from payroll, pass-throughs from AP, write-offs from AR, and percentage-of-completion from the ledger. Four systems, one spreadsheet, produced quarterly at best.
ERP by industry
Consultancies, accounting and law firms, engineering and architecture practices. Businesses whose product is their people, where a project running fifteen percent over is the difference between a good year and a flat one — and where the system of record usually cannot tell you that until it is too late.
Your size, your ledger, and your project tool. We will produce true margin by engagement from your own data.
The problems
None of these are unusual and none are a failure of discipline. They are what happens when the ledger, the time system, and the project tool were chosen separately.
Margin needs loaded cost from payroll, pass-throughs from AP, write-offs from AR, and percentage-of-completion from the ledger. Four systems, one spreadsheet, produced quarterly at best.
Friday-afternoon reconstruction is where utilisation data goes wrong. Late time means late invoices, which means DSO, which means the cash conversation.
Unbilled work in progress and percentage-of-completion revenue are the two numbers auditors probe hardest, and in most firms this size they live outside the accounting system.
You find out you were under-utilised after the quarter closed, which is exactly too late to sell into it or to avoid the hire.
A partnership, a services company, and a holding entity is a common shape, and consolidating them by hand each month is a risk nobody has time to fix.
Partners do not like chasing clients they have relationships with, so ageing slips quietly until it is a problem.
Where the money goes
A representative shape for a firm between $10M and $50M. Four of these six deductions originate outside the accounting system, which is why the number is so hard to produce.
Six points of revenue is a common write-off rate and most firms discover it annually rather than per engagement. It is almost always concentrated — one client, one phase, or one pricing assumption — which means it is fixable once it is visible.
Your stack
Delivery teams keep the tools they chose. What changes is that finance stops reassembling them by hand each month.
Benchmarks
Drawn from our own engagements with professional-services firms between $10M and $50M. The bar is a typical erp.io customer after two quarters; the marker is the segment median.
Professional services is where we start most conversations, and the reason is structural rather than commercial. A services firm needs almost none of the machinery that makes ERP implementations long: no bills of material, no routings, no warehouse bins, no lot tracking, no MRP, no landed cost. That removes most of the surface area where nine-month projects come from.
What is left is genuinely hard but narrow — project accounting, time, utilisation, revenue recognition, and multi-entity consolidation. Five things, all financial, all served by one data model.
For fixed-fee and milestone engagements, revenue earned is a function of progress rather than of what you billed. That calculation needs the schedule, the budget, and the actual hours — and in most firms this size it is performed quarterly in a spreadsheet by one person.
It is also the thing an auditor examines hardest, and the reason a firm approaching a transaction or a bank covenant suddenly needs to fix its systems. Percentage-of-completion driven directly from approved time against an agreed budget removes the workbook entirely, and it is the single highest-value thing we implement for this industry.
If you bill primarily on a product basis, hold meaningful inventory, or need field service dispatch and parts, this is not our strength. Firms with heavy international statutory obligations should look at NetSuite. We would rather say so here than in month four.
Questions
True margin by engagement, from your own timesheets, vendor bills, and invoices — before you change anything.