Fee & margin visibility
You know what you billed. Do you know what it cost to deliver?
Revenue tells you what came in. Realisation tells you what you kept. Most practices track one and guess the other — until a partner meeting surfaces a client who has been quietly unprofitable for two years, and nobody saw it because nobody was looking at time against fee.
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Built inside working practices, by people who had to close a month themselves.
Margin view · sample—
- Avg realisation across the book
- Unprofitable clients below cost recovery
- Best service line — Advisory
- Worst service line — Year-end accounts
Every figure opens the underlying engagements.
Trusted by the best
Realisation is not a report. It is a ratio that runs inside the work.
Time recorded against a fee produces a recovery rate. Recovery against the cost of delivering the work produces a margin. Neither number requires a spreadsheet — they are a by-product of the data your team is already entering.
Timesheets — the engine
Recorded time against the fee agreed at proposal stage is what turns activity into a recovery rate. This is the module that everything else depends on — and the one that requires honest, prompt time entry from the team.
Billing and WIP — what you captured
Recorded time not yet invoiced is visible as unbilled WIP. Billed against the fee agreed at proposal is the realisation rate. The gap between the two is where write-offs quietly happen.
Client-level view
Which clients cost more to serve than the fee recovers — by recovery rate, by total hours and by how long write-offs have been happening.
Service-line view
Where the fee model works and where it does not — across every client doing the same service, rather than inside one engagement at a time.
Partner view
Recovery by partner — so a pricing pattern that works across one book but not another becomes visible rather than averaged away.
Figures are illustrative. Realisation numbers will differ by practice, service mix and time-recording discipline.
The same margin data, cut for the person who needs to act on it
A partner deciding whether to re-price a service line needs a different view from a manager deciding whether to write off a job. Pick a role to see what it surfaces.
The practice margin at a level you can hold in your head — which service lines work, which clients drag, and where the fee model has drifted from reality.
Margin data without the ability to act on it is a more detailed complaint. These decisions can be made from the same screen.
The jobs in progress where time is accumulating faster than the fee allows — before the write-off decision is forced at billing.
A write-off at billing is a decision that was made six weeks earlier. These let you make it consciously.
What has been earned, what has been billed, and the write-offs in between — by client, by service and by period.
WIP that nobody chases becomes revenue nobody collects.
Year-end accounts: recovery 58%. Five clicks to why.
A service-line recovery rate is a starting point, not an answer. Here is the same number, drilled until it becomes a decision rather than a complaint.
The headline nobody can act on
Year-end accounts is running at 58% recovery across 34 engagements. Below the 80% target. Cause: not visible from here.
Split by client
The average hides a distribution. Most engagements are close to target; four are significantly below, pulling the line down on their own.
Open the worst client
Halloran Ltd: 31% recovery. Hours concentrated in one stage — records chase — across multiple people over an extended period.
Open the timesheet lines
Repeated short entries for chasing, re-requesting and reworking the same schedule. Three people. Six weeks. All before the accounts were even started.
The finding — and what changes
This is a records problem, not a pricing problem. Change the scope at renewal to price in the chase, or fix the request process. Both are defensible because the hours are evidenced.
Where the margin visibility stops
A recovery figure based on incomplete data is worse than no figure at all — it is confidently wrong. These are the boundaries worth knowing before a demo.
It depends on timesheets being kept honestly
Recovery and margin are both a comparison between recorded time and the agreed fee. If time goes in on a Friday from memory, the figures will be wrong — the reporting layer makes the gap visible, it does not fill it.
Your disciplineTrue margin needs payroll cost — this shows recovery
Realisation is measured against billing rates, not what each person actually costs the practice. Margin by employee requires payroll data this does not hold.
Not in this releaseThis is practice reporting, not client management accounts
This reports on how your practice runs — which clients cost what to serve. It does not produce management accounts for the clients you act for.
Different jobProof
Built inside working firms
FigsFlow was built in practice, not in a lab, by people who had to close a month themselves.
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