Professional Services

Margin, utilization, and cash discipline for firms that sell people’s time.

In a professional services firm, revenue is capacity times rate times utilization, and small slips in any one compound quickly. Fixed-fee overruns, unbilled work sitting in WIP, bench time between engagements, and slow collections all erode a margin that looked healthy at the proposal stage. Most firms see this in the bank balance before they see it in a report.

Buxbaum works with consulting, engineering, marketing, IT services, and other people-based businesses to put the numbers behind how the firm actually runs. We connect time, billing, and payroll data so leadership can manage by engagement, client, and team rather than waiting for a firm-wide P&L.

What We Offer Professional Services Companies

• Engagement, client, and practice-level margin reporting built on loaded labor cost, realized rates, and actual hours
• Revenue recognition for fixed-fee, T&M, retainer, and milestone work under ASC 606, including WIP, unbilled AR, deferred revenue, and percent-complete estimates
• KPI reporting on utilization, realization, effective bill rate, revenue per head, backlog, and pipeline coverage against capacity
• Headcount and capacity planning that ties hiring, bench, and subcontractor use to the sales forecast
• Cash forecasting around billing cycles, collections, payroll timing, and partner distributions
• PSA, timekeeping, and finance systems integration (Kantata, BigTime, Harvest, Deltek) with QuickBooks or NetSuite so time, invoicing, and the GL reconcile
• Quality of Earnings and diligence support covering recurring versus project revenue, owner and partner compensation normalization, cash-to-accrual conversion, and client concentration