Everyone is busy. The margin isn't.
Accounting, controller and fractional CFO work for professional services, from a team that has closed these books before.
What we usually see when a services firm passes 25 people
Revenue per person plateaus while headcount keeps growing. Utilization is tracked; realization is not, so write-downs hide in the gross margin. Unbilled work sits for sixty days, then the invoice sits for forty-five more. Owner compensation runs through the P&L in a way that makes profitability unreadable. Nobody knows which clients or service lines are carrying the firm.
The numbers we watch
— Utilization and realization by person and team
— Revenue and gross margin per billable person
— Unbilled WIP and days to invoice
— Days sales outstanding by client
— Margin by client and service line
— Owner compensation normalized against market
— Pipeline against capacity, 90 days out
— Cash against payroll cycles
What we build
— A monthly package with margin by client and service line
— WIP and billing discipline that turns work into invoices in days, not months
— Owner compensation separated from operating profit
— A 13-week forecast on payroll and collections
— A scorecard built around utilization, realization and cash
How the numbers connect
What the owner sees on Monday.
Everything to the right explains it.
Adds to cash
Collections
DSO by client
Margin by client
Billed hours × realized rate − loaded cost
Takes from cash
Payroll cycles
Semi-monthly, ahead of collections
Distributions
On a written calendar
The tree shows how cash is built for this industry: what adds to it, what takes from it, and the measures behind each. It is the structure of the scorecard we build.
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