When the product is people's time
Consulting firms, IT services companies, agencies and advisory practices sell hours. Everything that matters — margin, delivery, renewal — depends on knowing where those hours went and whether the work they bought is on track.
The four questions that decide profitability
Is the project on track? Plans, tasks, dependencies and resource allocation in one place, so slippage is visible while there is still time to act on it rather than at the review.
Where did the time go? Timesheets against projects and clients turn utilisation from a monthly guess into a number, and give invoicing something defensible to sit on.
What is in the pipeline? Opportunities, proposals and follow-ups tracked properly, because in a services business the gap between a warm enquiry and a lost one is usually a fortnight of silence.
Where is that document? Proposals, contracts, deliverables and client correspondence held with version control and access rules, rather than scattered across inboxes and drives.
Client requests and internal issues become tracked tickets with an owner and a closing time — which is also the record you produce when a client asks what happened.