Client Engagement Profitability
Your agent monitors time entries and billing data across every engagement, flags projects where realization rate drops below 80% or scope creep is building. You get real-time visibility into which client relationships are profitable and which are bleeding margin — so you intervene before a $200K engagement becomes a $50K loss.
35-40% of your billable work never gets collected. You find out at quarter-end.
Professional services firms average 60-65% realization rates, according to SPI Research's 2024 Professional Services Benchmark. That means for every dollar of work your team delivers, 35-40 cents disappear — eaten by scope creep, write-downs, and unbilled hours that nobody tracked in real time.
Most managing partners don't see the bleed until the quarterly P&L lands. By then, a project has been hemorrhaging margin for weeks. The typical consulting firm leaves $500K-$2M on the table annually from scope creep they catch too late. Your agent catches it the week it starts.
Pulls time, billing, and scope data from your existing stack. Calculates realization weekly.
The agent connects to your billing system — Harvest, Toggl, BigTime, or whatever your team uses — and pulls time entries against contracted amounts. It cross-references scope change requests and their approval status, tracks milestone completion rates, and even monitors client communication patterns. A spike in email and Slack volume is often the earliest signal that a project is going sideways.
Every week, it recalculates realization rate per engagement. When a project drops below your threshold — 80% is the default, but you set the number — you hear about it before the next invoice goes out.
Not a dashboard you check. A Slack alert with the problem, the cause, and the fix.
Dashboards collect dust. According to Gartner's 2024 Data & Analytics survey, fewer than 30% of analytics dashboards get viewed weekly by the executives they were built for. Your agent doesn't add another screen to ignore — it pushes the alert to where you already work.
Each alert includes the engagement name, the current realization rate vs. the starting rate, the specific driver (hours logged without scope approval, write-downs, unbilled work), and a recommended next step. You get a diagnosis, not a data point.
Every quarter: a profitability report that tells you where your firm actually made money.
The agent compiles a ranked list of engagements by realized profit margin — not just revenue, but actual collected dollars against hours invested. You see which clients consistently pay for the value they receive, and which ones drain your team's capacity without the return. According to McKinsey's 2024 professional services analysis, firms that track engagement-level profitability weekly grow operating margins 12-18% faster than those reviewing quarterly.
The report also surfaces scope creep patterns — which engagement types are most prone to unbilled hours — and staffing efficiency, showing which team members consistently deliver at high realization and which need support or different project assignments.