Sell days. Know where every one of them went.
The spreadsheet was the right answer at eight people. At twenty it is a second job for somebody, and it is still wrong by month-end.
The problem
A consultancy of twenty people sells days. Somebody keeps a spreadsheet of who is on which client for the next eight weeks. Timesheets go into a separate tool because it was free. The budgets live in the proposals that won the work. At the end of the month a director exports the timesheets, opens the proposals, and works out what can be invoiced and how much of each budget is left.
It works until it does not. A project quietly uses its forty days in thirty-two because nobody was watching the burn against the plan. Two people are double-booked in week six because the spreadsheet was edited on two laptops. A client is invoiced late because the milestone date was in a proposal nobody reopened. And the question "can we take this new piece of work on?" is answered from memory, because the honest answer is a day's work away.
The firm is not badly run. It is run on numbers that live in four places, and the cost of making them agree has grown faster than the firm has.
What changes
- Every budget shows days sold, used, planned and remaining, in days and money
- The plan and the timesheet are the same records, so nobody is double-booked
- "Can we take this on?" is answered from the availability report, today
- A project burning faster than planned shows up in the week it happens
- Month-end is opening a screen, not building a workbook
What Bitmap does with it
It holds the budget where the work happens
A project carries its budgets: forty days of engineering at the rate on the card. The planner books against it, the timesheet logs against it, and the budget page shows used, planned and remaining without anybody adding it up.
It makes the plan and the truth one thing
Book a person onto a budget for a run of days. When they log the time, the planned block gives way to the real one. The plan is always the future and the timesheet is always the past.
It answers "who is free?"
The availability report reads the planner and the leave records together and shows the free hours per person per week for the months ahead. Scenarios let you try the new project in the plan before you say yes.
It watches the burn for you
Health checks compare each budget's use against its allocation and its dates, and the operations screen lists the projects at risk every morning. The warning arrives in the week, not at month-end.
It gets the timesheets in
People log against the budgets they are booked on, from the plan of the day they already have. The ones who are late hear about it in Slack, from Bitmap, so nobody on your team has to chase.
It computes utilisation as you go
Billable and non-billable hours per person and per month, against target and against the days they could actually have worked, updated as timesheets change. The number your board asks for is already there.
People against weeks, booked onto budgets. Availability and the forecast read the same blocks, so they never disagree with the plan.
What it looks like in practice
A twenty-two person engineering consultancy moves its clients, projects and budgets into Bitmap over a fortnight, alongside the tools it already uses. The plan for the next quarter is rebuilt in the resource planner from the spreadsheet, by the person who kept the spreadsheet, in an afternoon.
From the following Monday people log time in Bitmap against the budgets they are booked on. The planner's blocks give way to the logged days as they arrive. On Thursday the operations screen shows one project whose budget is burning faster than planned; the account lead raises it with the client on Friday, three weeks before it would previously have shown up at month-end.
At the end of the month the two milestone payments that fell due are in Ready to Invoice with the amounts already worked out. Utilisation for the month is on the KPI screen on the first, per person, against target. The director who used to build the workbook opens it instead.
The other use cases
An agency running retainers and fixed-price work
You sell fixed prices, monthly retainers and managed services as well as days. Each is priced, delivered and invoiced differently, and no tool you have shows them side by side.
- Contract types for how the work is actually sold
- Payment schedules that raise themselves on the milestone or the month
- Which engagements make money, and which are subsidised
A finance team that wants month-end to take an afternoon
Month-end is a reconciliation across timesheets, proposals and the accounts package, and deferred income is a number nobody can produce on demand.
- Invoices fall due on their own and raise into Xero
- Deferred income at any date, per project and in total
- The board figures on the first, from the same records
Run your consultancy from one place.
Bring the planning spreadsheet. We will show you what the same quarter looks like in Bitmap, and what it tells you that the spreadsheet cannot.