Industries · Professional services
Bill the work you did, not the work you remembered.
Firms sell time and expertise, and both leak quietly — in hours logged late, scopes that grew without a change order, and pipeline that lives in individual partners' heads. We build the layer that makes utilisation, realisation and pipeline visible while the quarter is still running.
Before and after
What changes when
the data finally talks.
Today's friction
- Utilisation known monthly, in arrears, by practice group
- Realisation gaps found at invoicing rather than during delivery
- Time logged days late, so capacity decisions run on stale data
- Pipeline held in partners' heads and separate spreadsheets
- Project margin that is only knowable after the engagement closes
- Each practice group reporting on its own definitions
With Ontilus
- Live utilisation by person, team and practice group against target
- Realisation tracked per engagement as it is delivered, not at billing
- Scope creep flagged against the agreed estimate while it is happening
- One pipeline view across partners, with stage, source and owner
- Project margin visible mid-engagement, not reconstructed after it
- One set of definitions the whole firm reports on
What we build
Engineered for Professional services.
Every system is bespoke to your entity structure. These are the modules this sector almost always needs.
Utilisation & capacity
Billable and non-billable hours by person, team and practice group, against target and against capacity.
Realisation tracking
Booked versus billed versus collected per engagement, with the write-off surfaced where it happened.
Pipeline intelligence
Every opportunity with stage, source, owner and weighted value — one view across every partner.
Engagement margin
Cost-to-serve against fee while work is in flight, so an engagement can still be corrected.
Resourcing forecast
Committed work against available capacity, by skill and by week, feeding hiring and bench decisions.
Entity-level isolation
Hard separation between legal entities and offices, with access role-scoped to each.
Questions
Professional services,
answered.
The questions operators in this sector ask first. If yours isn't here, ask us directly — we answer scoping questions before there's a contract in sight.
Talk to usDo we have to replace our practice management system?
No. Ontilus reads from what you already run — practice management, time and billing, CRM, finance — through APIs where they exist and sync agents where they do not. The intelligence layer sits over those systems rather than replacing them.
How is this different from the reports our PMS already produces?
Your practice management system reports what was recorded, per system, in arrears. Ontilus consolidates across systems and entities, applies one set of definitions, and answers why a number moved — then recommends what to do while the engagement is still open.
Can it handle several practice groups on different systems?
That is the usual starting point. Different groups on different stacks, often after an acquisition, is exactly the case the platform is built for — consolidation happens in the data layer, so no group has to migrate first.
How do you handle client confidentiality between practice groups?
Access is role-scoped by entity, office and practice group, with hard isolation between legal entities and a full audit trail on every access event. Firm-wide reporting is served from governed aggregates rather than by opening one group's matters to another.
How long does a deployment take for a firm our size?
Discovery runs three weeks, working software follows from week four, and a firm-wide system is live in twelve — with a hypercare period after go-live while adoption settles.
How we deploy
Live in 12 weeks.
Proven before it scales.
We pilot on one entity and validate against your own close reports before anything goes group-wide. See the full deployment approach →